A day at a nudist resort? The notion tingles, deliciously shocking. Then anger flares. Why should nudity shock me, or anybody else? We are born naked. Had God intended us to wear clothes, we would have popped out in tweed.
When I reveal my plan, my friends’ eyes widen. They envision, I can tell, either debauchery or a throwback hippie commune, faded as old Kodachrome. Yet France, Germany, Spain, Croatia, the Netherlands, Brazil—many parts of the world remain calm when someone undresses. “Most Munich residents do not find public nudity in the park to be anything special,” notes a travel piece. “Getting naked is a way for people to allow themselves to be who they are and to get away from the stress of urban Munich, which is why designated naked zones are put up legally.”
You don’t have to be religious, or artistic, or creative, or a scientist, to understand that the world and what it contains is more than a 3D experience. To understand that truth, all we have to do is log on. Increasingly, our days are spent staring at screens, communicating with people we shall never meet. Young people who have grown up online consider that arena to be more significant to them than life in the “real” world. In China, there is a growing group who call themselves two-dimensionals, because work life, social life, love life, shopping, information, happen at a remove from physical interaction with others. This will become more apparent and more bizarre when metaverses offer an alternative reality.
Let me ask you this. If you enjoyed a friendship with someone you have never met, would you know if they were dead? What if communication continued seamlessly? What if you went on meeting in the metaverse, just as always?
A large part of the work of writing is inarticulable. Writers who can explain what they’re doing while they are doing it, the ideological aspirations that govern their work in progress—these writers are alien to me. The process more familiar to me is witchier, an optimistic ignorance sustained on occasional gifts from the void.
In Late, Michael Fitzgerald has achieved a novel in which time seems to clench. The reader is held within the frame of Zelda’s gaze, and given some insights into her mind. Densely intertextual in its scope, populated with literary and cultural references, Late is both witty and melancholic.
Pity the freelancer tasked with reviewing for The New York Times the intimate and joyful new memoir by the esteemed Times book critic Dwight Garner. Unqualified praise in these pages for “The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading” will never be entirely trusted. Fortunately, after my third reading of Garner’s eccentric bricolage of literary anecdote and autobiography, I did come up with a few qualifications.