AND ANOTHER THING
Why Eve decided to give up nudism
PAUL JOHNSON
Human beings need mysteries. The more sophisticated the species becomes, the more we need them. The advance of science lays bare progressively the secrets of nature, and as they are brought out into the pitiless daylight, they become dull and lifeless, just as vibrant, glittering fish hauled from the depths quickly turn into dead things on the bank. So in response we retreat deeper into the remaining thickets of the unknown. We need mysteries because they appeal to our higher faculties, our sense of wonder, the power of our imagination — as well as our cerebral skills in explaining them — and with mysteries, which are closely linked to our religious drive, come secrets, reticences, taboos, codes of restraint and manners, all the rules which help to make life complex and interesting. Mysteries are a consequence of human self-consciousness: they were born in the same instant. The Bible, not least Genesis, which I increasingly regard as a work of his- tory, albeit a peculiar one, describes the dawn of self-consciousness immediately after Adam and Eve ate the apple:
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made them- selves aprons.
The first fruit of their awareness of them- selves was the discovery of sex, which they realised was a mystery. Their response was to cover it up, an act which had the para- doxical and intended result of drawing attention to it.
Some people see the behaviour of the first couple as a retrograde step, bringing Shame and concealment into the world. But shame is the proof that conscience has begun to change. Concealment is an aes- thetic impulse: the first gesture Adam and Eye made to improve on nature. Those Who complain of fig-leaves on antique stat- ues ignore the historical fact that the fig- leaf was the earliest work of art. Before the Fall, these creatures were sinless but non- innovatory, obedient, well-behaved puppets in a divine show. They became interesting Only when they began to exercise indepen- dent will-power, the woman leading, the man following. Naked, and unaware of it, they were no more than superior animals.
be their aprons, they could begin to
oe human beings, indeed individual charac- ters.
I thought of Adam and Eve while gazing on Sunday at a series of newspaper photos taken inside a nudist club: members, male and female, throwing pink balls, playing with a dog, taking part in a beauty contest. Miss 1991 Naturist of the Year appeared grotesquely overweight, the men lining up to display their charms ugly and ridiculous. These photos could not have appeared in a family paper a dozen years ago. Today, they were shocking only in so far as they exposed the sheer unloveliness of the human body. The truth is, for the vast majority of us, at most ages, the body is better concealed and adorned, thereby made into an interesting mystery.
What applies to nudity applies in one way or another to every aspect of sex, which in its intrinsic form is a primitive, indeed animal activity, of no aesthetic, sentimental or intellectual appeal. Covered up, dark- ened, surrounded by taboos and inhibi- tions, it becomes a series of mysteries, of never-failing interest, a powerful stimulus to Creative activities of every kind. Humani- ty, for most of its existence, has been busy elaborating these rules and concealments, adding to the density and enriching the tex- ture of social life, posing fascinating prob- lems for its writers and artists to solve, set- ting the scenes for those entertaining tournaments of the human spirit, the bat- tles of taste. We laugh at the Victorians for putting trousers on piano legs. I have never come across authentic evidence they actu- ally did so, but if the tale is true it merely confirms they were a vigorously inventive generation, chips off the old Adam-and- Eve block.
For a hundred years now, and with accel- erating speed, we have reversed the pro- cess, laying bare the mysteries of sex. Increasingly, the uncomfortable bones are showing through. Last week the chairman of a football club called a press conference to announce that he and his wife were hav- ing difficulties and that he was conducting an affair with a young woman. The papers duly reported this barefaced but uninterest- ing disclosure to their readers, many of whom I suspect did not follow the man's emotional life closely. The same morning the BBC told us: 'This is British Condom Week. Slip into something safe and sexy. Get to love your condom and wear it fre- quently.'
Such ceaseless flashes of blinding light into every cobwebbed cranny and greasy, slippery undercroft of the sexual realm fills people of my age with distaste, but it doesn't exactly deprive us of much, since most aspects of sex have long since ceased to be mysterious. But for the child, the ado- lescent, the young, it is theft. Sex instruc- tion begins at the earliest possible age and penetrates into a greying number of aca- demic subjects. There are few eight-year- olds who have not heard of Aids. 'Unpro- tected' has a baleful meaning for them it never possessed in our childhood. Curiosity is satisfied before it has time even to be aroused. An unholy coalition pf the foolish- ly well-meaning, the blindly self-righteous, the commercially greedy and the sexually antinomian has united to disperse one of the greatest of all mysteries and reveal its sordid mechanics. It is part of the way in which childhood, that majestic creation the 19th century brought to perfection, is being stolen from the young by predatory adults.
In the long run we are all the losers because sexual mystery is an important component of civilisation itself, a detonator of the psyche: 'In mystery our soul abides,' as Matthew Arnold put it. Any painter knows that highlights are invisible without shadows, and that the beauty of forms rests on accompanying obscurities. Any novelist is aware of those moments when the narra- tor must fall silent and unleash the reader's imagination. The most sublime music is, in the end, an impenetrable mystery, which we can hear but cannot see or touch or explain. Some people of power and influ- ence believe, as an article of faith, that mys- tification is an evil and the source of human misery, that all must be laid bare and that if we can tear off Adam and Eve's aprons, we shall be able to re-enter the Garden of Eden. They, and the rest of us, I fear, are in for a horrible surprise.
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