ght 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 how
well he looked.... The country people occasionally come down to the
water on the Sabbath (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 worshipper 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-fibre 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.

It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which
have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations.
We have brutalised our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women
with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, and has not
come from women, but from the male-ordering of women's affairs to
satisfy his own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of
human reproduction is a man-arrangement according to present standards,
and every process is destructively bungled. However, that's a life-work,
that subject.

In colour, texture and contour, the thoughts of our ancestors have
debased our bodies, organically and as they are seen. Nudity is not
beautiful, and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this
heritage. The human body is associated with darkness, and the place of
this association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.

The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a
thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to
educate the countryside by browning his back in public. _That_ did not
appeal to us as a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would
frequently be interrupted by the town marshal. As a ma