The other day I saw a young swimmer in the surf. He was, I judged,
about twenty-two years old and a little less than six feet tall,
splendidly built, and as he stripped I saw that he must have been
swimming since the season began, for he was sunburned and brown.
Standing naked on the steep beach, his feet in the climbing seethe,
he gathered himself for a swimmer’s crouching spring, watched his
opportunity, and suddenly leaped headfirst through a long arc of air
into the wall of a towering and enormous wave. Again and again he
repeated his jest, emerging each time beyond the breaker with a stare
of salty eyes, a shake of the head, and a smile. It was all a beautiful
thing to see: the surf thundering across the great natural world, the
beautiful and compact body in its naked strength and symmetry, the
astounding plunge across the air, arms extended ahead, legs and feet
together, the emerging stroke of the flat hands, and the alternate
rhythms of the sunburned and powerful shoulders.
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mingled in or has withdrawn.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! Though
some scold to-day because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are
not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful. All
my life it has given me pleasure to see beautiful human beings. To
see beautiful young men and women gives one a kind of reverence for
humanity (alas, of how few experiences may this be said), and surely
there are few moods of the spirit more worthy of our care than those in
which we reverence, even for a moment, our tragic and bewildered kind.
My swimmer having gone his way, out of a chance curiosity I picked the
top of a dune goldenrod, and found at the very bottom of a cocoon of
twisted leaves the embryo head of the late autumnal flower.
_Chapter X_