"The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World"

I just wanted to share with you an excerpt from Elaine Scarry's book, "The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World". It's a passage which has stayed with me since I first read it, and one that I have revisited many times when in need of understanding and inspiration - it's a beautiful, if not superfluous, image which does well to encapsulate the true relationship of the body to architecture.

"In normal contexts, the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within; like the body, its walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world, yet in its windows and doors, crude versions of the senses, it enables the self to move out into the world and allows that world to enter. But while the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a miniaturization of the world, of civilization. Although its walls, for example, mimic the body's attempt to secure for the individual a stable internal space - stabilizing the temperature so the body spends less time in this act; stabilizing the nearness of others so that the body can suspend its rigid and watchful postures; acting in these and other ways like the body so that the body can act less like a wall - the walls are also, throughout all this, independent objects, objects which stand apart from and free of the body, objects which realize the human being's impulse to project himself out into a space beyond the boundaries of the body, in acts of making, either physical or verbal, that once multiplied, collected, and shared are called civilization."