Hasidic Jews in Galicia used to wear belts of loud, vivid stripes to cut the body in two, to separate the more acceptable part, which included the heart, lungs, liver and head, from the part with the intestines and sexual organs, which was barely tolerated. Catholic priests raised the line of demarcation, making the clerical collar a visible sign of the primacy of the head, where God in Person dips His fingers. As I watched the children playing naked and saw the stripes across their midriffs, I thought of nuns, who sliced head from face with one cruel stripe, stuffing it into the armour of the starched coif like Formula One drivers. Those naked children splashing away in the water didn't know a thing about sex, yet their sexual organs, as Lao-tze taught me, were serenely perfect. And when I considered the stripes of the priests and nuns and Hasidic Jews, I thought of the human body as an hourglass - what is down is up and what is up is down - a pair of locked triangles, Solomon's seal, the symmetry between the book of his youth, the Song of Songs, and the vanitas vanitatum of his maturity in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

-- Bohumil Hrabal, as quoted by James Wood in The London Review of Books