Nudity

Part of our European vacation was to exercise the mind with something other than which kind of packing box should we fit that piece into or whether the objects unpacked should go over here or there.  London was as usual the mind and soul's distraction.  Favored with perfect temperatures and blue skies we walked hand in hand through Kensington Gardens past the Serpentine with the queen's swans, past Princess Diana's memorial fountain, a favorite spot for children gamboling in the water under the eye of their mothers lying on the adjacent grace, onto the stretch known as Rotten Row, all the way down to Marble Arch.  Ah, heaven!  The same thought was on display on the faces of all the others out for their fill of the last good days of summer.  We saw the exhibition of Virginia Woolf's literary and social life in the heady days of Bloomsbury at the National Portrait Galley; we had perfect seats for a performance of Euripides' "Medea" at the Natonal with the brilliant Helen McRory in a natural style that was at the same time transcendent as one expects from ancient tragic dramatic ladies; and we preceded that delight with a joyous encounter in the galleries of the Tate Modern, a converted industrial building with giant spaces, this time so many devoted to the cutouts of Matisse.  Taken all together in appropriately large spaces, they had never been shown to such advantage and we reveled in the colors, shapes, and coherences.  Glorious!  Then on to Wiesbaden to take long daily soaks in pools of hot thermal water at the ancient Kaiser Friederich Baths, a major resource of this beautiful and exceedingly wealthy town.  Everybody, it seems, goes to the baths.  The Germans go as much for the icy cold swimming pool, and the still colder sitting bath, and the impossibly icy plunge bath as for the heated sauna, steam room and thermal pools.  I timidly stayed in these last.  A special feature of this bathhouse is that total nudity is required when using any of the facilities, locker rooms are available to male and females old and young without distinction.  Only toilets and shower rooms are designated for a given gender.  One quickly gets used to the extraordinary variety of patches of pubic hair on display, the various shapes and sizes of breasts on the women, and the same variegation displayed in penises, the freedom with which some heavy set and elderly women bent over and allowed their ponderous breasts to hang down in ungainly fashion, the unselfconscious large males with smallish equipment, the equal aplomb of the men who were sporting erections engendered by sitting long times in the heat of the thermal pools, all available for all to see as the owners of these bodies descended and ascended the stairs coming into the pools.  No room for modesty, no room for timidity.  We all were as we were made and have grown, human creatures defined by body, not personality, not intellect, not cosmetic enhancement of physical beauty, and everyone thus had the beauty of idiosyncracy, the beauty of uniqueness.