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I remember from many years ago, when I first read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a passage where he looks at his trousers while he is under the influence of mescaline, and he describes experiencing an intense fascination:

Those folds in the trousers–what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel–how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!

The Doors of Perception (1954)

I don’t have flannel pants, but the enchantment holds true on corduroy, too. (In fact, Huxley was supposedly wearing denim during the experience he describes, but his wife — after reading the text — told him he needed to dress up for the reader.)

There was a time when I ignorantly felt such aesthetic bewitchments could properly be studied only under the influence of mind altering drugs. Bit of hashish, typically. Rebel youth, indulging in illegal substances, feeling edgy and brilliant and visionary. But I don’t any longer find it so: instead I’ve realized I have the power to willfully loose myself in sensual captivations and meditative meanderings on beauty, to let myself be whisked away and ponder the wonderfully sublime, alive in profound reveries, hallucinogenic-like, but without recreational psychotropics to usher me in.

It’s magic, really.

And so is corduroy.

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