Kafka on the Nudist Beach

In the changing room later, I experience a different kind of warmth: the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren’t the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond all joy to be bikini-ready, and tanned as an act of disguise. These are northern bodies, slack-bottomed and dimpling, with unruly pubic hair and the scars of hysterec

The whole town was ripe with salt and haunted by the action of the tides. At night it filled with boisterous drunk men.

Eroticism is one of the few forms of play permitted to adults. It occurs in a world parallel to the habitual one; it frees us to adopt new personas; it has a tendency to generate enduring communities whose members are "apart together" even when its excesses have come to an end; and, finally, it is dispensable and therefore indispensable.

Kafka was as popular in the Village at that time as Dickens had been in Victorian London.