In some organs, injury overwhelms repair. In some organs, repair keeps apace with injury. In yet other organs, there’s a delicate equilibrium between one rate and another. The body, in its steady state, seems to be maintained—suspended—in constancy. Don’t just do something, stand there. But standing there, standing still, is not a statis but a frenetically active process. What appears as “stillness”—stasis—is, in fact, a dynamic war between these two competing rates. “At death you break up,” Philip Larkin wrote, “the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no
...more
