…the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.
(…)
all day all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane –smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant…
On being ill, Virginia Woolf.