Is a Person Alive?
Abstract
In a collection of three personal essays, or something close to it, Is a Person Alive? responds to questions around what life contains and how it may continue. The work takes its title from Robert Macfarlane's recent book, Is a River Alive?, to expand and explore conceptions of aliveness.
"It seems clear to me then, in that strange, bright water, that to say a river is alive is not an anthropomorphic claim. A river is not a human person, nor vice versa.
To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen the category of ‘life,’ and in so doing–how had George Eliot put it?–‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in'" (Robert Macfarlane).
This paper has been withdrawn.
