I can think of no greater evil than the insistence that we are only meat. How many lives have been demeaned—destroyed—by that insistence? How many millions? That city, what it offered, suggested that we were nothing more, and so the men who traded in flesh—offering surgery, therapy, and replacement—offered people a vision of their best selves. As if identity were fluid. As if who we are is only granted to us by others and is by others taken away. As if no part of us is our own.
