)
As I walk'd slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show
the shadow moving with me. Somehow I seem'd to get identity with each
and every thing around me, in its condition. Nature was naked, and I
was also. It was too lazy, soothing, and joyous-equable to speculate
about. Yet I might have thought somehow in this vein: Perhaps the
inner never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, &c.,
is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the
whole corporeal body, which I will not have blinded or bandaged any
more than the eyes. Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!--ah if
poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once
more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your
thought, your sophistication, your tear, your respectability, that is
indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too
irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she
to whom the free exhilarating extasy of nakedness in Nature has never
been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known
what purity is--nor what faith or art or health really is. (Probably
the whole curriculum of first-class philosophy, beauty, heroism, form,
illustrated by the old Hellenic race--the highest height and deepest
depth known to civilization in those departments--came from their
natural and religious idea of Nakedness.)
Many such hours, from time to time, the last two summers--I attribute
my partial rehabilitation largely to them.
Pages:
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182