Nakedness
Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me… Nature was naked, and I was also… Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! - ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness 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 ecstasy of nakedness in Naturehas 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.
Walt Whitman in “Specimen Days”
