What marvel, you ask? Such marvel that I hesitate to describe it, as words can do no justice. The men beyond the glass, swarming and chattering and raising a din, are stark naked, each and every last one. Like Taiwanese aboriginals. Like twentieth-century Adams. To trace through the history of human clothing -- This may get lengthy. I'll refrain from tracing it through and defer to dear old Teufelsdröckh. -- Suffice it to say that clothes make the man. So much so that Beau Nash, at the spas of Bath in Great Britain in the eighteenth century, enforced a strict dress code. Both men and women, even as they bathed, were covered from shoulder to toe. Going back sixty years from the present, again in England, a school for design was founded in a certain town. Being a school for design, they procured replicas and castings of nude paintings and forms for display throughout the premises. That was fine, but then it was time to open the school with a grand ceremony, and that presented the founders and staff with a conundrum. Any grand ceremony, by definition and necessity, had to include the lady folk. In those days, however, in the mind of a proper lady, man was a creature of clothing. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a naked ape merely sporting a pelt. Man without clothing was void essence, like an elephant minus its trunk, a school without its pupils, or a soldier sans valor. Robbed of his essence, he was no longer man, but reduced to the level of beastly brute. Even if merely drawings and castings, a noble lady was loathe to compromise her dignity by placing her person among such men-brutes. Citing such reason, the town's ladies, one and all, humbly declined at attend. The staff thought them most unreasonable, but at the same time were acutely aware that ladies, in all lands near and far, serve to adorn an occasion. They may not make good millers, and they may not make good soldiers, but an opening ceremony, without the grace of their presence, was out of the question. With no other recourse, off they went to the fabric shop. They came back toting thirty five and seven eighths lengths of black fabric, and each and every naked brute was duly masked in cloth. Lest a lady be offended, all were fully and carefully clad to the neck. Thus, as the story's told, was disaster averted and the school opened per plan. This incident exemplifies importance of clothing in human affairs. Some scholars these days fixate on the nude, living and breathing its artistic grace. These men are misguided. To one such as myself, who's never in his life been disrobed, the error of their ways is clear. The nude, drawing on traditions of Greece and Rome, and spurred by a Renaissance Period penchant for debauchery, has come to be in vogue. For the Greeks and Romans, though, nudity was second nature and in no way connected, whatsoever, with morality. Not so in Northern Europe, where the climate is cold.