June 12, 1852
What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his notebook, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties.
I don't think of HDT as a licentious man. When it came to clothes, manners, and behavior he was fairly restrained and conservative. But no doubt he must have felt about Nature the way that Walt Whitman did.
The atmosphere is not a perfume.... it has no taste
of the distillation.... it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever.... I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
But as much as Thoreau was an individual, and as much as he was more inclined to follow the ways of animals rather than the ways of man, I can't imagine him going out in public without being adequately clothed. (Now, bathing at Walden Pond, I'm sure, was an entirely different story.
I don't think of HDT as a licentious man. When it came to clothes, manners, and behavior he was fairly restrained and conservative. But no doubt he must have felt about Nature the way that Walt Whitman did.
The atmosphere is not a perfume.... it has no taste
of the distillation.... it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever.... I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
But as much as Thoreau was an individual, and as much as he was more inclined to follow the ways of animals rather than the ways of man, I can't imagine him going out in public without being adequately clothed. (Now, bathing at Walden Pond, I'm sure, was an entirely different story.
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