Porter’s book is unusual in our reading (is there something else besides “L’Enfant de Malheur”? help my tired brain) that considers what might come after life. I mentioned this quotation in my 11:00 section and Amal asked if I could post it for further reflection:
“Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes” (323).
I think the Machen Bowmen story considers what might come after life. While the it doesn’t explicitly reference heaven, it does talk about angels and saints. That at least suggests the idea of an afterlife, and a pleasant one at that. I do find it interesting that Porter’s book discusses a peaceful afterlife in a way that many of the books we’ve read about the war itself do not. Perhaps the idea of peace seems too far-fetched for someone at the front.
This quote is an interesting logical fallacy (defining something by itself) that tries to explain something we humans honestly can’t know about until we experience it. I don’t know for sure if death has attributes for the dead or not. What I do know is that humans have tried to explain death for thousands of years and we still haven’t reached a consensus. (Then again, we haven’t fully reached a consensus on whether the Earth is round.)