Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson: When the Scalpel Opened the Body

Entering the anatomy hall of Rembrandt's painting, the narrator finds a pale body stretched within a circle of men, and the dead man tells him he once walked through Amsterdam and has now become a question: where does the body end, and where does the human being begin? Dr. Nicolaes Tulp explains the movement of the hand, and the narrator asks whether he can also explain why the same hand rises in prayer, or mercy when the palm opens, until the doctor says the anatomy lesson ends here and the narrator replies that the lesson of the human being begins. With an architect's eye he sees cables, joints, tension and compression in the opened arm, hears the hand say that almost every city came out of it, and finds Rembrandt building a chamber out of light and darkness, with the body as its horizontal axis, the students as a gathered mass and light as another scalpel that opens meaning. Death speaks as a silent teacher, asking the physician to learn without arrogance and the architect to build knowing that every building will age, while verses of the Qur'an on the soul, on the knower above every possessor of knowledge and on the command to read in the name of the Lord frame the scene as a lesson in humility. In the closing dialogue Rembrandt asks whether he has seen the human being, and the narrator understands that the scalpel found tendons, muscles and the heart as an organ without finding will, tenderness, memory or love, so that he came to read a lesson in anatomy and found a lesson in the limits of knowledge.