From the high crest, the beach below seemed a fragile, ephemeral strip of earth, a pale thin line merely marking a momentary edge of the vast, incomparable, and all-encompassing sea.
When I reached the summit, I sat in the shade of a ledge below the lip to have lunch. I noticed two sunbathers on the beach far below me. One was a man in his late 50s or early 60s, with short thick steel-gray hair. He was lying face down on a towel, but after while he got up and sauntered unhurriedly down to the edge of the waves. He had a large paunch, but his body was still muscular and strong, and his pink skin heavily tanned. He might’ve been a magazine ad for business executives “getting away from it all.”
Watching him, I thought of a similar scene in Henry Beston’s The Outermost House where he watches a naked young swimmer in the surf. The sight evoked in him a complex reaction about public nudity. He wrote: “Watching this picture of a fine human being free for the moment of everything save his own humanity and framed in a scene of nature, I could not help musing on the mystery of the human body and of how nothing can equal its rich and rhythmic beauty when it is beautiful or approach its forlorn and pathetic ugliness when beauty has not been mingled in or has withdrawn. Poor body, time and the long years were the first tailors to teach you the merciful use of clothes!”
At first it seemed that the figure of this middle-aged, large-bellied man on the beach below me might confirm Beston’s cautionary words about naked bodies when, as he put it, “beauty…has withdrawn.” The man was certainly no longer young, and his body was well past its prime. But as he stood there, at the edge of the surf, his thick arms folded, looking out at the sea where a single white and blue sloop skipped over the waves, he seemed to give the lie to Beston’s pronouncement. He seemed somehow not just unashamed, but a proud figure - alone, unselfconscious, unashamed, contemplative - an old god, perhaps, surveying his domain.
This is an excerpt from Robert Finch's audio essay, posted above in full.
