5
THE BODY
IN FLOW
“A man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his own body,”
wrote J. B. Cabell, “yet the body of man is capable of much curious
pleasure.” When we are unhappy, depressed, or bored we have an easy
remedy at hand: to use the body for all it is worth. Most people nowa
days are aware of the importance of health and physical fitness. But the
almost unlimited potential for enjoyment that the body offers often
remains unexploited. Few learn to move with the grace of an acrobat,
see with the fresh eye of an artist, feel the joy of an athlete who breaks
his own record, taste with the subtlety of a connoisseur, or love with a
skill that lifts sex into a form of art. Because these opportunities are
easily within reach, the easiest step toward improving the quality of life
consists in simply learning to control the body and its senses.
Scientists occasionally amuse themselves by trying to figure out
how much a human body might be worth. Chemists have painstakingly
added up the market value of skin, flesh, bone, hair, and the various
minerals and trace elements contained in it, and have come up with the
paltry sum of a few dollars. Other scientists have taken into account the
sophisticated information processing and learning capacity of the mind-
body system and have come to a very different conclusion: they calculate
that to build such a sensitive machine would require an enormous sum,
on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Neither of these methods of assessing the body makes much sense.