As I walkd slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show the
shadow moving with me. Somehow I seemd 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 fear, 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 isnor
what faith or art or health really is. (Probably the whole curriculum
of first-class philosophy, beauty, heroism, form, illustrated by the
old Hellenic racethe highest height and deepest depth known to
civilization in those departmentscame from their natural and religious
idea of Nakedness.)
--from "A Sun-BathNakedness" by Walt Whitman
And the weaver said, "Speak to us of Clothes."
And he answered:
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment,
For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.
Some of you say, "It is the north wind who has woven the clothes to wear."
But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.
And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
-Khalil Gibran - quote from "The Prophet"
"This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilizationheld nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed
in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindranceand a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a
prisoner he had been."
Edgar Rice Burroghs, "Tarzan of the Apes"
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