So they laid me here with my silver armlets, my gold comb, my chain and with little painted figures.
In my life I was happy, knowing many sorts of love and none evil.
If you are a lover, scatter dust, and call me “dear one” and speak one last “Hail.”
Telos.
Nudity and the Ideal
Will Levington Comfort
One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so well—had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his bare flesh—that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting himself half-dressed.... The country people occasionally come down to the water on the Sabbath or to sell (from their homes back on the automobile routes and the interurban lines) and for what they do not get of the natural beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However they didn’t miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.
They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was shameless.
Now, I am no worshiper of nudity. I’d like to be, but it disappoints in most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious of itself—and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent these shores.
The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fiber that is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth—and vision requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive, scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they are prone to sink.