the garage gospel: the Montclair as a body that responds
It’s an object, Jim, a body, but don’t let it fool you, sitting here, mute. It will respond. If given its due. With artful care.
Context
The car pressed into the body-doctrine: the 1956 Montclair — "it's a machine" that "will do what it's made for and do it perfectly, but only when stimulated by someone who's made it his business to know its tricks and seams, as a body." The father erases the line between machine and body in both directions — the driver "feels the big steel body he's inside" the way he feels his own sinew and bone. The lesson bleeding under the car-talk is that a body, like a machine, is an instrument that "will respond" only to the one who knows and respects its seams.