On Silks, a Passage -- by Alex Ranieri

Who will wax poetic over polyester? No one—unless it be in the style of Milton, picking over with fascinated disgust the inner workings of a Satan. Surely this is proof that human beings have an innate knowledge of good and evil; that we would behold the shimmering threads of a faux-silk and yet, at its cold, antiseptic touch, recoil from hymning its praise, and shun its name and its presence in our catalogue of the great and the good—where, at the touch of real silk, warm as if the very animal from which it was reeled, reaches out to us in fellowship—in our joy and wonder, line after line will we compose, as many stanzas as threads in a length of cloth, in abject adulation.