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The Old English SEVEN SLEEPERS, Eros, and the Unincorporable Infinite of the Human Person Eileen A. Joy I know you want to keep on living. You do not want to die. And you want to pass from this life to another in such a way that you will not rise again as a dead man, but fully alive and transformed. This is what you desire. This is the deepest human feeling; mysteriously, the soul itself wishes and instinctively desires it. —Augustine1 Wrenched out of Their Histories In Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Brief History of the Dead, there are only two geographies, separated by the membrane of death. First, there is the City, which is inhabited by the recently departed, mainly victims of a viral pandemic that has wiped out the entire population of the earth except for one person, Laura Byrd, who inhabits the other place, Antarctica , where she had been working at a research station when, essentially, the world came to an end. There is significant bleed-through, however, between the City and the world. As the weather worsens in Antarctica, snow begins to cover every surface in the City, and as Laura lies frozen in her tent one late afternoon, feeling her heartbeat in every part of her body, that same heartbeat fills the air of the City “like a soft rain of ashes— so abundant that it revealed the smallest motions of the wind.”2 Those who live in the City conduct each day much as they did when they were alive: going to work, eating meals at home and in restaurants, strolling the streets and sitting on park benches, going to the movies, having sex, and even engaging in debates over where it is, exactly, they might actually be, and what they are. “Of course we’re bodies,” one of the characters argues with another. “Bodies and nothing but. Have you ever heard of a spirit that ate hamburgers and chili dogs for lunch, a spirit that got leg cramps in the middle of the night?”3 Laura Byrd has a vague idea what has happened to everyone and spends most of the novel trudging across the ice shelf looking for other survivors and simply trying to stay alive. Apparently the human figures of the City exist only in direct proportion to someone’s living memory of them, and because Laura is the only human being left alive on earth, only 71 the souls of those she can remember can keep on living, as it were. There are Laura’s family members, of course, and past lovers and friends, teachers and fellow workers, but also anyone she ever ran into and can still remember: mailmen, street beggars, four Korean women who played mahjongg in her neighborhood park, her doorman, a stranger she once gave a book of matches to, and so on and so forth. As long as she can stay alive, so will the inhabitants of the City, all of whom have died and are keenly aware that they are in some kind of purgatory or outer room that lies adjacent to the place you go when no one is left who remembers you at all. When Laura finally succumbs to the elements, lying alone and hallucinating fiercely in her tent in a penguin rookery at the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf, her toes and fingers black and crumbled from frostbite, the streets and buildings and bridges of the City begin to disappear, and the inhabitants all gather at the park in the center of town, waiting “for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories.”4 As Laura lies dying, the predominant noise outside of her tent is the incessant , hectic chattering of the penguins—a harsh reminder that, even with every single human being, and therefore all of human memory, extinct, the world still continues, and there is no one who is human to register the loss. Brockmeier’s novel is a beautiful and arresting meditation on the afterlife, and on the belief, prevalent in many cultures, that without the proper rituals of remembrance, the dead are either condemned to wander perpetually through non-places or do not really exist at all, except as general abstractions. And in its heartbreakingly sad last sentence, just quoted, the novel also speaks to a very human anxiety and dread over the idea of a disembodied afterlife...

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