Gym Aesthetic Quotes

No longer kneeling at the foot of the bed, knees on the hard wood of the gym floor, Aunt Elizabeth standing by the double doors, arms folded, cattle prod hung on her belt, while Aunt Lydia strides along the rows of kneeling nightgowned women, hitting our backs or feet or bums or arms lightly, just a flick, a tap, with her wooden pointer if we slouch or slacken. She wanted our heads bowed just right, our toes together and pointed, our elbows at the proper angle. Part of her interest in this was aesthetic: she liked the look of the thing. She wanted us to look like something Anglo-Saxon, carved on a tomb; or Christmas card angels, regimented in our robes of purity. But she knew too the spiritual value of bodily rigidity, of muscle strain: a little pain cleans out the mind, she’d say.

With the body judged externally, dismay will be rife. Success means looking younger every year, as the women in the gym seem to. Success means regulating the body: controlling hungers, desires, ageing and emissions. Success means seeing the body as a lifelong work. Success means anticipating faults - physical, medical, and aesthetic - and correcting them. But when and if the ordinary processes of the body cannot be sufficiently restraint, which of course they can't, the body becomes a source of consternation as well as failure.