Soul

A while back, some old friends of ours came for lunch, bringing their son, their first child. Now in his thirties, he’s severely handicapped, a victim of cerebral palsy, and he’s also somewhat developmentally disabled. Although he’s confined to a wheelchair, he lives on his own, in an apartment close to that of his parents. But he will always need supervision and care. His mother has kept up with us by means of yearly Christmas letters, so I have followed the progress of her three sons, and I was glad to meet the eldest, who has been a source of so much concern for his parents. He struck me an exceptionally pure and sweet soul. In fact it was he who convinced me there is such a thing as a soul.

What do I mean by soul? I don’t mean that his soul, whatever it is, would survive him. While it would be pleasant to believe in an afterlife, at least one without punishment, I believe that when we die we cease to exist. All that remains, in my view, is the influence we’ve exerted on others and their memories of us, both of which, of course, necessarily diminish and then disappear with time. That the books we’ve written or the art we’ve created will long survive us, for all but the most transcendent geniuses, is nothing but a fatuous hope. My books and articles will remain in libraries and data banks for maybe another 20 or 30 years, but fewer and fewer people will read and cite them until nobody ever does at all. Maybe that’s already happened.

Perhaps this is a dismal philosophy, but to my mind it makes life immensely precious, behooving us to live each day to the fullest and to appreciate the privilege of being alive. Whenever I start to feel bored by an activity (standing in line, for example), I remind myself that it’s so much better to do this than to be able to do nothing at all ever again.

So when I wrote that our friends’ son convinced me that he has a soul, I meant that the innocence and sweetness that shone out of his eyes is a quality independent of personality and intellect, just as is the color of his hair. It’s a kind of aura. Personality and intellect can be described, measured, assessed more or less reliably. Can the quality of soul, this aura of which I speak, also be described consistently? Would independent judges come to the same conclusion about the character of a person’s soul? If not, then the notion of soul in the sense I’m using it is entirely mystical, and I will have to stand for at least an hour in the corner reserved for lapsed empiricists.