"At different historical moments, out of the pressure of cultural, social, and material change new images and associations emerge. In the sixteenth century the epistemological body begins to be imagined not only as deceiving the philosopher through the untrustworthy senses (a Platonic theme) but also as the site of our “locatedness” in space and time, and thus an impediment to objectivity. Because we are embodied, our thought is perspectival; the only way for the mind to comprehend things as “they really are” is by attainment of a disembodied view from nowhere. In our own time (as another example of the emergence of new meanings), the “heaviness” of the bear has assumed a concrete meaning which it probably did not have for Shwartz, who uses it as a metaphor for the burdensome drag the body exerts on “the self”; my students, interpreting the poem, understood it as describing the sufferings of an overweight man. For Schwartz, the hunger for good is just one of the body’s appetites; for my female students, it is “the” most insistent craving and the preeminent source of their anger and frustration with the body, indeed, of their “terror” of it."