Put your arm around somebody. Give someone a hug:
The New York Review of Books of February 3, 1994, for example, carried a review of the correspondence of William and Henry James along with a photograph of the two brothers standing together with William’s arm around Henry’s shoulders. Apropos of this picture, the reviewer, John Bayley, wrote that ‘their closeness of affection was undoubted and even took on occasion a quasi-physical form.’ It is Mr. Bayley’s qualifier, ‘quasi-physical,’ that sticks in one’s mind. What can he have meant by it? Is this prurience masquerading as squeamishness, or vice versa? Does Mr. Bayley feel a need to assure his psychologically sophisticated readers that even though these brothers touched one another familiarly, they were not homosexual lovers?
The phrase involves at least some version of the old dualism of spirit and body or mind and body that has caused so much suffering and trouble and that raises such troubling questions for anybody who is interested in health. If you love your brother and if you and your brother are living creatures, how could your love for him not be physical? Not spiritual or mental only, not ‘quasi-physical,’ but physical. How could you not take a simple pleasure in putting your arm around him?
– Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, p. 92
