Episode #51: Preface by Myriam for the 1963 edition

Jan,16 2026

<-#50: 2 Christopher - Chapter 29 - Mantle#52: Preface to the expanded edition by Ruth ->

I am writing this in a time very different from the one in which these books were first set down.

When my father began to copy the words he heard in the field, there was no word for what we were doing. We did not call ourselves naturists, or reformers, or anything at all. We were simply people trying to live without the weight of shame. The world was not ready for that idea, and perhaps we were not ready for it either.

Now, decades later, the word naturism is spoken openly. There are clubs, magazines, movies, and organizations with letterheads and presidents and secretaries. I sometimes smile when I see those serious pamphlets because what we lived was never serious in that way. It was ordinary. It smelled of soil and soup. My father never imagined a movement. My husband certainly did not. They would both have been suspicious of anything that required membership.

I inherited these books twice: the first one as my father's daughter and later as the wife of the man who wrote the second. I have often wondered which inheritance weighed more. My father wrote with the enthusiasm of discovery. He believed he was recording a clear light. My husband wrote with the caution of someone who had already seen that light refracted through many different windows. Between them stands Christopher, the same man in both books, yet somehow different in each pair of eyes.

People sometimes ask me which portrait is true. I cannot answer. My father saw a teacher who opened a door. My husband saw a man trying to prevent that door from becoming a wall. I saw both, and neither. Christopher was simpler than the first book suggests, and more complicated than the second admits. He was also, most of the time, just tired, patient, and slightly amused by all of us.

If these writings feel uneven, it is because life was uneven. There were seasons when we believed we had found a new way of being human and seasons when we were only trying to get through a cold winter or a hot summer. There were years of laughter and years of war. There were children born and children sent away in uniforms too large for their shoulders. The books carry all of that, whether they intend to or not.

Some readers will come to these pages looking for permission. Others will come looking for rules. I must warn both groups that they will be disappointed. Christopher did not give permissions, and he did not write rules. He only tried to live honestly in front of us, and we, being human, turned that life into arguments, quotations but often, said nothing at all and just nodded with a warm smile.

I have kept the manuscripts as they were left, with all their contradictions. To smooth them would be to lie about our history. My father's confidence and my husband's doubt belong together, like two hands that cannot carry a pail alone. Between them you may glimpse the man we knew, though even that glimpse will change depending on the light you bring with you.

They call him holy; we called him a friend.

If naturism has grown since those early days, it is not because of these books, but because the world slowly learned to breathe a little easier. Perhaps the few initial copies sold helped a few people along that path. Perhaps they hindered others. I no longer try to measure such things. I am an old woman now, more interested in gardens than in arguments.

I offer these writings to you not as a map, but as a window. Look through them if you wish. You will see our small town, our mistakes, our tenderness, and the stubborn hope that a person might live without fear of their own skin. That hope was premature in my father's time. It was fragile in my husband's. It is still fragile now.

Take from these pages what helps you be kinder.

Leave the rest to the dust where it belongs.

Myriam

1963

<-#50: 2 Christopher - Chapter 29 - Mantle#52: Preface to the expanded edition by Ruth ->