Skin

Skin is the layer of usually soft, flexible outer tissue covering the body of a vertebrate animal, with three main functions: protection, regulation, and sensation.

Quotes

• This stuff, he thought, this living stuff, our skin: my wife's, a precious husk which holds my hostage now to the hereafter; my own, the scabbed, hairy, sensitive livery wherein I must fop out my alloted years; this living stuff, our skin: this envelope, so often misaddressed, so often dispatched into the world with insufficient postage; this enchanting gullet of ambrosial zephyrs and bad breath; this tender blossom, pistil and stamen, a casket of beauty prepared for us at birth; this Darwinian mucilage binding bone to spirit, divinity to bowels, exigeant vice to exigeant virtue; this costly wrapping in which, like finest Havana leaf, we puff ourselves away to perfect ash; this tactile boundary of our small cellular selves, puny, two-legged nations vociferous of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of antibiotics, crying peace but strife-ridden ever, waging within our territories civil and corpuscular wars, putting down riots of the adrenals, having to choose eventually between anginal boom, thrombotic bust, and a riffraff host of kindred catastrophies or lento, cackling, geriatric decline and fall; this coat of mail impervious to jousting’s lance yet blooded by the proboscis of a mosquito; this wind-sock according to which, during solo hours, we direct the tricky private craft of our consciences into landings sometimes lethal; this miracle fabric, Skinlon, by which our charms and monstrosities equally are girt, but which, advertisement to the contrary, wrinkles, takes much pressing, and attracts more mundane lint than we had known existed; this prose of flesh, a vulgate language all may speak but few may comprehend (the best way to explore the universe is to look through a telescope into someone’s navel); this living stuff, a mortal, multicolored rind which, when removed at last, the fruit thereof we give the earth to eat.
  • Glendon Swarthout, Welcome to Thebes (1962), pp. 286–7

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Skin on Wikipedia