References in the Raw
Dan Doran
from Eminent Thinkers
From: HeIsNude (Original Message) Sent: 7/1/2002 7:58
AM
What is outside yourself does not convey much worth;
Clothes do not make the man, the saddle not the horse.
Angelius Silesius
Now, since everything else is furnished with the exact
amount of needle and thread required to maintain its
being, it is in truth incredible that we alone should
be brought into the world in a defective and indigent
state, in a state such that we cannot maintain
ourselves without external aid.
Montaigne, "On the custom of wearing clothes"
Our skin is provided as adequately as theirs with
endurance against the assaults of the weather: witness
so many nations who have not yet tried the use of any
clothes. Our ancient Gauls wore hardly any clothes;
nor do the Irish, our neighbors, under so cold a sky.
Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebonde"
For all parts of the body that we see fit to expose to
the wind and air are found fit to endure it: face,
feet, hands, legs, shoulders, head, according as
custom invites us. For if there is a part of us that
is tender and that seems as though it should fear the
cold, it should be the stomach, where digestion takes
place; our fathers left it uncovered, and our ladies,
soft and delicate as they are, sometimes go half bare
down to the navel.
Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebonde"
Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own
companions, and the only one who, in his natural
actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own
kind.
Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebonde"
Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly
confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher
animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing.
They are not ashamed.
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
We are ashamed of everything that is real about us;
ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our
incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our
experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Human bodies are words, myriads of words,
(In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or
woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay,
Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or
the need of shame.)
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
I suppose we acquire most of our feelings about our
bodies too early, and in ways too complicated, to make
them easy to account for.
Charis Wilson
Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed -
naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has
ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked,
unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest.
They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind,
there was no other way to get it. ... The convention
mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have
one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is
therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's
whim - anyone's diseased caprice.
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
There are one hundred and ninety-three living species
of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of
them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked
ape self-named Homo sapiens. The zoologist now has to
start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a
premium.
Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape
It is so basic. A human being is an innocent part of
nature. Our civilization has distorted this universal
quality that allows us to feel at home in our skin.
Other animals have coats that they accept, but the
human race has yet to come to terms with being nude.
Ruth Bernhard
How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if
you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare,
rare fiddle?
Katherine Mansfield
Whatever the reasons, I enjoyed being nude; it felt
natural to me. I got the same kind of pleasure from
being free of clothing that many people get from being
well dressed.
Charis Wilson
Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet
have become hardened and used to the ground. My body,
almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the
sun. Civilization is falling from me little by little.
I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very
little hatred for my neighbor - rather, to love him.
Paul Gauguin, Noa, Noa: The Tahitian Journal
This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held
nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed
sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and
conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a
nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized
what a prisoner he had been.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
For a time Jack was angry; but when he had been
without the jacket for a short while he began to
realize that being half-clothed is infinitely more
uncomfortable than being entirely naked. Soon he did
not miss his clothing in the least, and from that he
came to revel in the freedom of his unhampered state.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Son of Tarzan
By now I was utterly deprogrammed. I walked along
naked usually, clothes being not only putrid but
unnecessary. My skin had been baked a deep terra-cotta
brown and was the constituency of harness leather. The
sun no longer penetrated it. I retained my hat.
Robyn Davidson, Tracks
The best dress for walking is nakedness. But our sad
though fascinating world rarely offers the right and
necessary combinations of weather and privacy, and
even when it does the Utopia never seems to last very
long.
Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker III
Now, nakedness is a delightful condition. And it keeps
you very pleasantly cool - especially, I suppose, if
you happen to be a man. But as I walked on eastward
that afternoon through my private, segregated, Tonto
world (exercising due care at first for previously
protected sectors of my anatomy) I found I had gained
more than coolness. I felt a quite unexpected freedom
from restraint. And after a while I found that I had
moved on to a new kind of simplicity. A simplicity
that had a fitting, Adam-like, in-the-beginning
earliness about it.
Colin Fletcher, The Man Who Walked Through Time
By walking naked you gain far more than coolness. You
feel an unexpected sense of freedom from restraint. An
uplifting and almost delirious sense of simplicity. In
this new simplicity you soon find that you have
become, in a new and surer sense, and integral part of
the simple, complex world you are walking through. And
then you are really walking.
Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker III
Freed from the pressure of haste, the tyranny of film,
and now the restraint of clothes, I found myself
looking more closely at what went on around me.
Colin Fletcher, The Man Who Walked Through Time
At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of
indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images;
on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered
balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure.
Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living
With a little inner pirouette of excitement I realised
just how much there was to look forward to tomorrow.
The thought of being all day naked in the sun was
delicious enough in itself, but there was the whole of
our new world to explore.
Lucy Irvine, Castaway
In the first weeks I had occasionally worn clothes in
the morning before the sun began its ascent, but very
soon I abandoned this habit, and the only bit of
material I ever wore was the strip of sari cloth
around my hips, which was so useful for making into a
bag to collect coconuts on walks.
Lucy Irvine, Castaway
Last night I had rinsed out my sari strip and briefs
in the sea. I walked down naked to where they hung in
the branches of the silvery leafed tree beside the
creek. Underneath the lazy sensuality of a luxurious
stretch from toes to nose I felt the strong
unequivocal demand of my blood. I hugged myself for a
moment watching the grey light yield to dawn through
half-closed eyes.
Lucy Irvine, Castaway
She lives a sophisticate's life among worldly people.
At the slightest excuse she steps out of civilization,
naked and relieved, as I should step out of a soiled
chemise.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek
Bare skin is the one and only right criterion for
receiving water's gracious acceptance or any
acceptance whatsoever from that element. But Pliny
also seems to say something more: Stripping off not
caution but the stale, crusty garments of
preconception, peeling sensibly down to raw, new
nakedness, is the only way to enter and be properly
embraced by the world.
Janet Lembke, Skinny Dipping
Human beings to me are as much a part of nature as
trees or birds, and the unclothed body expresses this
belongingness directly and powerfully.
Wynn Bullock
I will go to the bank by the wood and become
undisguised and naked.
Walt Whitman
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 the 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 is--nor what faith or art or health really is.
Walt Whitman, A Sun-bathed Nakedness
The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it
feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the
eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like
radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure
glow not explainable.
John Muir
Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change;
perhaps I am at the edge of discovering what more our
bodies might be able to teach about the spirit of
life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to
understand our relationship to the whole universe.
Ruth Bernhard
The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I
hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind.
Mark Twain, Huckelberry Finn
The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no
standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed
to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality
and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased
caprice.
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
The human body represents to me the same universal
innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods,
suggesting the mother as well as the child, the
parental as well as the descendant, conceived
according to nature's longings.
Ruth Bernhard
If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.
Walt Whitman, "I Sing The Body Electric"
To see you naked is to recall the Earth.
Federico Garcia Lorca
Significance is inherent in the human body.
Julia Kristeva
The body says what words cannot.
Martha Graham
Truth is, most of us contain a splashing, giggling,
squealing child who knows without thinking that bare
skin and water go together as wings go with air, roots
with earth, and the phoenix with incendiary sun. And
innocence belongs to us as it did to ancient Greek
athletes, who never wore clothes for their footraces
or boxing matches but rather oiled themselves until
their nude bodies glistened in the sunlight.
Janet Lembke, Skinny Dipping
Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be
To taste whole joyes.
John Donne, "Elegie XIX"
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot
recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than
the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment
with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo
The noblest art is the nude. This truth is recognized
by all, and followed by painters, sculptors and poets.
Only the dancer has forgotten it, who should remember
it, as the instrument of [the dance] art is the human
body itself.
Isadora Duncan
'Tis well - but, Artists! who can paint or write,
To draw the naked is your true delight:
That robe of quality so struts and swells,
None see what parts of nature it conceals.
Th' exactest traits of body or of mind,
We owe to models of an humble kind.
Alexander Pope, "Epistle to a Lady"
The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has
painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is
just about to put her clothes back on.
Odilon Redon
The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no
saint, sat to Canova as a reclining Venus, and being
asked if she did not feel a little uncomfortable,
replied, "No. There was a fire in the room."
William Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote
Esq.R.A.
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 drain. Would that you could meet the
sun and the wind with more of your body and less of
your raiment.
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
Beauty is not diminished by being shared.
Robert Heinlein, Job, A Comedy of Justice
In nakedness I behold the majesty of the essential
instead of the trappings of pretension.
Horatio Greenough
Men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what
they fear most is the troubles with which any
unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen
naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A
naked body has to be seen as an object in order to
become a nude. (The sight of it as an object
stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness
reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be
naked is to be without disguises.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Robert Graves, The Naked and the Nude
"I've always found it very difficult to understand the
laws as far as nudity in America--how some things are
pornographic and some things are not pornographic.
It's against the law to go topless on the beach, but
you can go buy a gun. That just seems so absurd to
me." (Elle MacPherson, Australian model)
"A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and
perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,
a denizen of the woods. A pale white man! I do not
wonder that the African pitied him." (Henry Thoreau,
"Walking")
"We find that relaxing with clothes off at Elysium
Fields is a great tension reliever, for ourselves and
our kids too." (actress Lynn Redgrave)
"Did I mention that I have on no clothes? I know. The
first thing most people do when they get up is put
something on. Not me. It just seems more natural to
walk abound on a brand new morning, in a half-dark
house, with nothing between me and Mother Nature but
my good intentions." (Tim Allen, in his book "I'm Not
Really Here")
"...our garments are typical of our conformity to the
ways of the world, i.e. of the devil, and to some
extent react on us and poison us, like that shirt
which Hercules put on." (Henry Thoreau, in a letter to
H. G. O. Blake)
"Tell the Pope that this is a small matter and it can
easily be made suitable; let him make the world a
suitable place and the painting will soon follow
suit." (Michelangelo, to Pope Paul IV when he was
asked to censor the nudity on the Sistine Chapel)
"Hehehehe...we saw naked people!" (Beavis and
Butthead)
"It's definitely cultural. I think we ought to be more
like the French in most everything, and the Germans as
well. We're way too uptight here; it's a beautiful
thing over there." (Rush Limbaugh, on nude beaches)
"For me, nudity is something natural, almost
spontaneous. I become aggressive and proud when I'm
nude." (Countess Vera Gottlieb von Lehndorff)
"A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was
like a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared
with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the
open fields." Charles Darwin
"Nineteen percent of American married couples swim
together in the nude." New York Times 2/12/1990, on a
survey performed by Catholic sociologist Andrew M.
Greeley
"...it wasn't for a sun tan. I just love having no
clothes on outside, and the only time to do that is
when the sun's shining. It's a wonderful sensation to
not have any clothes on." singer P.J. Harvey, on being
naked in the open air
"Because God created it, the human body can remain
nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendor
and its beauty." Pope John Paul II
"Sometimes I like to run naked in the moonlight and
the wind, on a little trail behind out house, when the
honeysuckle blooms. It's a feeling of freedom, so
close to God and nature." Dolly Parton
"I like to run down to the beach and have a little
swim in the nude in the morning." former US Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara
"The church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The
body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a
business. The body says: I am a fiesta." Eduardo
Galeano, "Windows on the World"
"Complete nudity in itself is not erotic. It becomes
so only when preceeded by or contrasted to a state of
dress. In this limited context then, all clothes
become somewhat immoral, if we define immorality as
inciting sexual interest. Habitual nakedness may
indeed be capable of elevating man to a higher mental
plane..." Dr. Marylnn J. Horn, "The Second Skin: An
Interdisciplanary Study of Clothing"
"It is an interesting question, how far men would
retain their relative rank if they were divested of
their clothes." Henry David Thoreau
"Mislike me not for my complexion, the shadow'd livery
of the burnish'd sun..." Shakespeare
"I believe that sitting naked across from your
adversary in a steam room makes negotiations more
productive." David Shapiro, federal mediator
"We need to be protected from theft and violence, not
nude people." Richard Hongisto, San Francisco
Supervisor
"...I really didn't know what to expect, but I was
amazed at how I came to feel about my rather portly
body! I remember coming away from the club feeling
wonderful about myself." Jim McDonald, "101 Ways to
Kick Depression"
"Christian morality did not originally preclude
nudity, but by the Fifth Century the anti-body
philosophy adopted by the church fathers was so
entrenched that St. Jerome considered it immoral for a
Christian virgin to bathe in the nude--even if alone."
Ray Bowen Ward, Professor at Miami University
"An apple tree puts to shame all the men and women who
have attempted to dress since the world began." H. W.
Beecher, 1862
"Government, like dress, is the badge of lost
innocence." Thomas Paine, "Common Sense"
"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going
barefoot is merely populism." John Updike
VtNM: The Male Body in the Fine Arts and Popular
Culture
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/visualizingthenakedman
http://WorldGroups.com/groups/SpotlightingtheMaleNude
http://hometown.aol.com/heisnude/myhomepage/books.html
http://hometown.aol.com/heisnude/myhomepage/movies.html
http://groups.msn.com/MaleFigureintheFineArts/
http://xxxratedgroups.com/group/Naked_Men/
VtNM: The Male Body in the Fine Arts and Popular
Culture
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/visualizingthenakedman
http://WorldGroups.com/groups/SpotlightingtheMaleNude
http://hometown.aol.com/heisnude/myhomepage/books.html
http://hometown.aol.com/heisnude/myhomepage/movies.html
http://groups.msn.com/MaleFigureintheFineArts/
http://xxxratedgroups.com/group/Naked_Men/
VtNM: The Male Body in the Fine Arts and Popular Culture
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/visualizingthenakedman
http://WorldGroups.com/groups/SpotlightingtheMaleNude
http://hometown.aol.com/heisnude/myhomepage/books.html
http://hometown.aol.com/heisnude/myhomepage/movies.html
http://groups.msn.com/MaleFigureintheFineArts/
http://xxxratedgroups.com/group/Naked_Men/
