Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 10
X.
I sat on the sea-shore one forenoon in midsummer. The sea lay quietly gleaming in the sun before me, and a great number of people were bathing. The naked white bodies, the blue water, the golden quivering air, made me fancy I was gazing at a piece of southern Hellenic life.
Tiny waves lapped up over the pebbles on the shore, slid back and came again—so small, so gentle, as to hardly merit the name of waves. They were the youngest children of the ocean, and they babbled to themselves as children do, and it was clear to me that all their prattle was just something they had heard of late from father and mother, and they were repeating it now to themselves, without knowing the meaning of the words.
"Ay, the sea is the greatest source of health, the one that keeps the universe sound. I have salt enough for all the corpses of life, and in me men lave themselves clean."
There is one thing that men need—to keep their bodies clean. In this lies Salvation and the future—to cherish their bodies as a precious vessel. Rather slay one's enemy than forget to shift one's shirt—so runs the first commandment in the new moral law,—that some day, when the journeymen have learnt to keep silent in the assemblies, the new Master will incise on a gold tablet before all the people. And in measure as he shifts his shirt and scours his body white, so will he loathe that belief or thought that he has borne through the week, and his soul will always walk in shining white linen.