every cell is a kingdom

 

.

I think of the medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna’s floating man, who, denied all sensation, still knows, as proof of the soul, that he exists. I am not sure I believe him. A better answer is found in the Roman poet Lucretius’s argument in his epic poem, ‘De rerum natura,’ that we can die inch by inch. Every cell is a kingdom of both substance and spirit, and any kingdom can be overthrown. 

Our life force, like our flesh, never seems to issue away from us all at once. Anyone who has been half dead can attest to this. What we call our soul can die in small quantities, just as our bodies can be worn, amputated, and poisoned away, bit by bit. The lost parts of our souls are no more replaceable than the lost parts of our bodies, life incrementally lifting from life, just like that.

—Anne Boyer

The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness

. . .

It is dreadful when the body we have made demands a soul from us. But it is far more horrifying, dreadful, and uncanny when we have made a soul, and it demands its body from us and chases after us. When we think a thought, we have made such a soul, and our thought gives us no peace until we give it its body, until we have brought it to sensory appearance. 

The thought wants to be deed; the word wants to be flesh. And wondrously! A human being, like God in the Bible, has only to express his thought, and the world forms itself; there is light or there is darkness, the water divides itself from the dry land, or wild beasts even appear. The world is the word’s signature.

—Heine

On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany

.