Cobb's Anatomy. Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
think of a great many because the events of my past life were rapidly flashing past me—as is customary, I am told, in other cases of grave peril, such as drowning—I say of all the places in the world there were just two where I least desired to be—one was up on top of that horse and the other was down under him. But it seemed to be a choice of the two evils, and so I chose the lesser and got under him. I did this by a simple expedient that occurred to me at the moment. I fell off. I was tramped on considerably, and the earth proved to be harder than it looked when viewed from an approximate height of sixteen miles up, but I lived and breathed—or at least I breathed after a time had elapsed—and I was satisfied. And so, having gone through this experience myself, I am in position to appreciate what any other man of my general build is going through as I see him bobbing by—the poor martyr, sacrificing himself as a burnt offering, or anyway a blistered one—on the high altar of a Gothic ruin of a horse. And, besides, I know that riding a horse doesn't reduce a fat man. It merely reduces the horse.
So it goes—the fat man is always up against it. His figure is half-masted in regretful memory of the proportions he had once, and he is made to mourn. Most sports and many gainful pursuits are closed against him. He cannot play lawn tennis, or, at least according to my observation, he cannot play lawn tennis oftener than once in two weeks. In between games he limps round, stiff as a hat tree and sore as a mashed thumb. Time was when he might mingle in the mystic mazes of the waltz, tripping the light fantastic toe or stubbing it, as the case may be. But that was in the days of the old-fashioned square dance, which was the fat man's friend among dances, and also of the old-fashioned two-step, and not in these times when dancing is a cross between a wrestling match, a contortion act and a trip on a roller-coaster, and is either named for an animal, like the Bunny Hug and the Tarantula Glide, or for a town, like the Mobile Mop-Up, and the Far Rockaway Rock and the South Bend Bend. His friends would interfere—or the authorities would. He can go in swimming, it is true; but if he turns over and floats, people yell out that somebody has set the life raft adrift; and if he basks at the water's edge, boats will come in and try to dock alongside him; and if he takes a sun bath on the beach and sunburns, there's so everlasting much of him to be sunburned that he practically amounts to a conflagration. He can't shoot rapids, craps or big game with any degree of comfort; nor play billiards. He can't get close enough to the table to make the shots, and he puts all the English on himself and none of it on the cue ball.
Consider the gainful pursuits. Think how many of them are denied to the man who may have energy and ability but is shut out because there are a few extra terraces on his front lawn. A fat man cannot be a leading man in a play. Nobody desires a fat hero for a novel. A fat man cannot go in for aeroplaning. He cannot be a wire-walker or a successful walker of any of the other recognized brands—track, cake, sleep or floor. He doesn't make a popular waiter. Nobody wants a fat waiter on a hot day. True, you may make him bring your order under covered dishes, but even so, there is still that suggestion of rain on a tin roof that is distasteful to so many.
So I repeat that fat people are always getting the worst of it, and I say again, of all the ills that flesh is heir to, the worst is the flesh itself. As the poet says—"The world, the flesh and the devil"—and there you have it in a sentence—the flesh in between, catching the devil on one side and the jeers of the world on the other. I don't care what Dr. Woods Hutchinson or any other thin man says! I contend that history is studded with instances of prominent persons who lost out because they got fat. Take Cleopatra now, the lady to whom Marc Antony said: "I am dying, Egypt, dying," and then refrained from doing so for about nineteen more stanzas. Cleo or Pat—she was known by both names, I hear—did fairly well as a queen, as a coquette and as a promoter of excursions on the river—until she fleshened up. Then she flivvered. Doctor Johnson was a fat man and he suffered from prickly heat, and from Boswell, and from the fact that he couldn't eat without spilling most of the gravy on his second mezzanine landing. As a thin and spindly stripling Napoleon altered the map of Europe and stood many nations on their heads. It was after he had grown fat and pursy that he landed on St. Helena and spent his last days on a barren rock, with his arms folded, posing for steel engravings. Nero was fat, and he had a lot of hard luck in keeping his relatives—they were almost constantly dying on him and he finally had to stab himself with one of those painful-looking old Roman two-handed swords, lest something really serious befall him. Falstaff was fat, and he lost the favor of kings in the last act. Coming down to our own day and turning to a point no farther away than the White House at Washington—but have we not enough examples without becoming personal? Yes, I know Julius Caesar said: "Let me have men about me that are fat." But you bet it wasn't in the heated period when J. Caesar said that!
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