To my mind, there is an unambiguous answer to this question. The cells inside a brain are not the bearers of its consciousness; the bearers of consciousness are
A novel can withstand transplanting even though readers in the “guest language” haven’t lived on the soil where the original language is spoken; the key point is, they have experienced essentially the same phenomena on their own soil. Indeed, all novels, whether translated or not, depend on this kind of transplantability, because no two human beings, even if they speak the same language, ever grow up on exactly the same soil. How else could we contemporary Americans relate to a Jane Austen novel?
Carol’s soul can withstand transplanting into the soil of my brain because, even though I didn’t grow up in her family and in their various houses, I know, to some degree, all the key elements of her earliest years. In me robustly live and survive her early inner roots, out of which her soul grew. My brain’s fertile soil is a soul-soil not identical to, but very similar to, hers. And so I can “be” Carol albeit with a slight Doug accent, just as James Falen’s lovely, lilting, and lyrical English transplantation of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse
The sad truth is, of course, that no copy is perfect, and that my copies of Carol’s memories are hugely defective and incomplete, nowhere close to the level of detail of the originals. The sad truth is, of course, that Carol is reduced, in her inhabitation of my cranium, to only a tiny fraction of what she used to be. The sad truth is, my brain’s mosaic of Carol’s essence is far more coarse-grained than the privileged mosaic that resided in
When the sun is eclipsed, there remains a corona surrounding it, a circumferential glow. When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them. Inevitably, as time passes, the afterglow fades and finally goes out, but it takes many years for that to happen. When, eventually, all of those close ones have died as well, then all the embers will have gone cool, and at that point, it’s “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”.
Several years ago, my email friend James Plath, knowing of my intense musings along these lines, sent me a paragraph from the novel
Late the next morning he sat sewing in the room upstairs. Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he is watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved — so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living?
CHAPTER 18
I Host and Am Hosted by Others