In honor of the end of No Shave November, I am celebrating the greatest and worst of facial hair (or is it Movember? The terminology is beyond me).
And the award for best facial hair in the history of mankind goes to...
SALVADOR DALI! This guy was passionately devoted to maintaining his gorgeous mustache, and it was nothing short of a work of art. Surrealist art, yes, but it was art. He even wrote an entire book about his mustache, accompanied with artistic glamor shots featuring his facial growth.
The award for worst facial hair goes to... *drumroll*
Henry David Thoreau, the famous Romantic American author. The guy notorious for being a literary hippie who lived out in the purity of the wilderness at Walden Pond. I'm not even sure that this counts as facial hair because it's a neck beard. It's godawful ugly, whatever it may be. It's hilarious to think of Louisa May Alcott's opinion of it, because she's the writer of the quintessential American girl book Little Women. It's like Thoreau was the unpopular little dweeb among the high school of Romantic authors. Ralph Waldo Emerson would throw slushie in his face while Louisa May Alcott led the popular girls in tormenting him. I blame the neck beard. It probably kept him warm when he was at Walden Pond in the Massachusetts winter, but that's why the scarf was invented: to prevent the neck beard.
Thoreau was actually a Transcendentalist. These guys were the hippies of their time, as you said; they protested the state of their culture and society. I daresay he was Thoreauly fed up with society.
ReplyDelete(credit to my English teacher for that one)