The scientific viewpoint, ever
persistent: There is no ‘soul’ and no ‘will’—these are fictions, universal
fictions, like the Garden of Eden.
Oliver Sacks, letter to a friend, May 25, 1969
Les âmes
mortes. Rabelais had to flee France to save his ears from being cropped by
censorious theologues for having ventured to pun on âme (soul) and âne
(ass).
B.G. Guerney
Las almas muertas. I’ve
lived a long life, I’ve searched the world over, and guess what? Nowhere no way
is a living soul to be found. Look all around you, circumnavigate the
planet—not a soul to be seen.
O.G. Zakamora
Die toten Seelen. Dead Souls was the eremitic cell where Gogol
the monk floundered around, prostrated himself, suffering travail and torment,
until, finally, the day they bore him lifeless out of that cell.
P. V. Annenkov
Господи, Ты
сказал в Святом Евангелии, что мертвые услышат глас Сына Божия и оживут. Так
ныне сотвори, чтобы мертвые души наши услышали глас Твой и ожили бы в радости.
Translation: Lord, Thou saith in
the Holy Gospels that the dead would hear the voice of the Son of God and would
come back once more to life. So that this day grant that our own dead souls
might hear Thy voice and might come alive again in joy. (From the Russian Eastern
Orthodox prayer book [Molitvoslov].
The last line of the prayer marked
No. 1 in the series titled Молитвенные прошения преп. Силуана Афонского: Prayerful Supplications of the
Reverend Silouan the Athonite.
Your Kingdom: an infinity of
being. Souls unborn, yet-to-be-born, never-to-be-born, souls transparent and
light-riddled . . . Souls shifting and flowing through one another, light as
the seed of dandelions, graceful as tiny rainbow-hued fish, fragile as butterflies.
Joyce Carol Oates, Son of the Morning
[epigraph page in front matter of forthcoming book by U.R. Bowie: The Futile Search for a Living Soul: A New Reading of Gogol's "Dead Souls"]
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