Time-bent Nudist-Vegan Memoir
Reveals Bygone Era - OURS! - to
Enlightened New Generations
Imagine a world at peace. Harmony and respect for all living things. All-natural diet. And... the freedom to go naked!
The visionary-fantasy novel Strange Days Indeed paints such a picture - with a twist.
Our memoir writer, 112-year-old Zet Quimby, is reminiscing about present times - times he lived through - from an enlightened 2061 perspective. One universally embracing body freedom and peaceful diet.
As he tells puzzled future generations curious about the odd way we lived and why, he casts a laser beam on the unlikely history of two age-old, now archaic, customs: compulsory-compulsive dress and cruelty-based diet.
Who hasn't imagined how nice it'd be if we didn't always have to wear clothes? Or deem it barbaric the way millions of feeling animals are destroyed each day to become a dubious food source?
"In our heart of hearts, we were all natural-born nudists."
So writes Zet, in his memoir teleported back to our time. After 2012, dramatic earth changes and a quantum leap in mass consciousness have transformed life on Earth. In telling how improbably we lived before the transformation, Zet recounts his own life as affected by our perma-dressed ways and unkind eating habits.
Not surprisingly, future generations view our old world as most peculiar.
"..an enlightening story that creatively promotes a more aware and compassionate way of living."
-Will Tuttle, Ph.D, author of The World Peace Diet - Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
Stuart R. Ward's novel, while scoping the history of society's dress and diet habits, also explores current trends in holistic lifestyles and the unlikely paths one takes to find oneself in a world's population removed from nature's gentle ways.
Equal parts nudist novel, veggie story, pop history, and visionary fantasy,the work breaks away from any nonfictional book treatments of main subjects. Subjects rarely dealt with together in any guise. Even though natural diet and radical body freedom are both integral to living in harmony with nature - which is, after all, what the green movement is ultimately all about. The book uses its futuristic sci-fi story framework to gain radically fresh perspective, allowing for visionary, "what-if" thinking.
"Advocates of body freedom and natural diet must have felt at times they were stranded on some strange flesh-eating, textile-obsessed planet."
- Zet, from novel
Mulling over our present times (his distant past), Zet offers a bushelful of reasons why we kept dutifully wrapped in cloth even on nicest days, though it crimped our comfort, drained our pocketbook and invalidated the integrity of our being. And he delves into what drove us to routinely rob, kill, and devour fellow sentient beings, in the process generating needless suffering, undermining health, degrading the planet's ecosystem, and - critically - stifling humanity's innate spiritual awareness and all-inclusive compassion for every living thing.
He relates how, growing up near San Francisco's blossoming 1960s Haight-Ashbury counterculture, he got swept into the merry contagion and its massive, no-boundaries departure from the abnormal norm.
Realizing he could no longer fit into conventional society, Zet flees the city to live in the high desert woodlands around Mount Shasta,in the northwest U.S. There he revels in the glad tidings of nature, shedding conventional conditioning, along with his clothes and former ruinous diet.
Now, in 2062 and living in a whole new world, he tries making sense of mankind's former habits. After exploring the myriad contributing factors, Zet boils them down to one: humanity's profound disconnect from nature.
He muses over how and why we first got that way, how we got to where the notion of not concealing one's body in public was deemed immodest, anti-social and perverse. To where the idea of not devouring slain sentient beings and robbing mothers of nursing fluids meant for their young was thought unhealthy, weird - and perverse. He traces encouraging present trends rejecting such compassion-disconnected thinking and clearing the way for near-future sea changes in mainstream lifestyles.
All the while he ties the memoir to his own fitful quest for liberation. Using his own unlikely life experiences as fodder for how odd our times were (are), he shows how prevailing wonky conditions all too easily slowed the unfolding of our innately noble and peace-loving selves.
"...Quimby's take on his own experience of the times...is astute, wryly humorous, and often laugh out loud funny ... The book is much more than a polemic for the naturist movement." - Sibyl Walski, Mount Shasta Herald [CA]
"We felt the need to devour part of an animal carcass before thinking we'd had a real meal." - protagonist Zet
Even as Zet shares his experiences and those of quirky relatives, his memoir brims with real names in recent news, with dates, quotes and figures, also supplying capsule histories of nudism and veggie diet and green awareness. Included are Germany's early 1900's nature-cure movement - the little known but profoundly influential proto-hippie phenomenon - and the later hippie-rainbow counterculture directly linked to it through time.
"...Ward takes us on a cultural journey, some of it rooted in the past and some, imagined, projected into the future. And what a future, indeed."
- VegNews
In due course, our narrator recounts how catastrophic natural disasters - fused with the quantum shift in awareness - lead at last to planetary peace - fulfilling mankind's age old desire to live in harmony with all life...
...and the freedom to go naked!
~ Site updated May 12, 2012 ~
