Though really evergreen, the leaves are so small and scattered that even in full growth the plant has a peculiar appearance, and yet so thickly do the stems interlace that there is no suggestion of nakedness.
Thus, nakedness has been able to be imagined as both an indecent state needing to be covered by "culture" (clothing) and a pure state far superior to the indecent cultural masquerade of clothing.
The nakedness of "savages," for example, has been imagined as evidence of their inferior humanness-but it has also been subject to romanticization (the "naturalness" of the "noble savage").
In the Judaic tradition, however, in which the Godhead was imagined as gloriously veiled, nakedness was more likely to signify degradation, humiliation, or loss of personhood.
It was then he began the slow realization that it was not his beloved wife who spooned against his back in nakedness, sharing his bed!
It seems to me, that Edith had a very rapid mood change from flaunting her nakedness in front of Claire to...killing herself, practically minutes later.
Under this head fall the following: - Fasting, or abstention from certain meats and drinks; denial of sexual instinct; subjection of the body to physical discomforts, such as nakedness, vigils, sleeping on the bare ground, tattooing, deformation of skull, teeth, feet, &c., vows of silence to be observed throughout life or during pilgrimages, avoidance of baths, of hair-cutting and of clean raiment, living in a cave; actual self-infliction of pain, by scourging, branding, cutting with knives, wearing of hair shirts, fire-walking, burial alive, hanging up of oneself by hooks plunged into the skin, suspension of weights by such hooks to the tenderer parts of the body, self-mutilation and numerous other, often ingenious, modes of torture.
Even the earliest name Nigantha, which means "free from bonds," may not be without allusions to this curious belief in the sanctity of nakedness, though it also alluded to freedom from the bonds of sin and of transmigration.
Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe.
Chmielnicki, by suddenly laying bare the nakedness of the Polish republic, had opened the eyes of Muscovy to the fact that her secular enemy was no longer formidable.
