User:JN
AboutAnd the living are made of cardboard. Nashe, a scientist fixated on substance, found a way to worship the flesh in its infinitesimal complexity – though he would spit that degrading and blasphemous word flesh from his tongue. A skein of nervous tissue is the chiasma of all that we once set apart – thought and feeling, body and mind, the great dualities commingled and united. The outside enters and becomes the inside, the abstractions of meaning coalesce into thought and action. And it cleaves. Nashe muttered: "I have five staples in my skull, and they are part of me. Why not this book, whose text I have taken to heart? Why not this sleeping man, here? "We are all one flesh". Are we? Do we want to be? Were I to slip this scalpel between his ribs, I would not feel his pain. One can take the hand of a man doubled over in torment, and feel nothing. Where do we begin and end? The mystery of stimulus proscribes our limits. And I want to be separate from him, to drink his intricate cacophonies and harmonies like a fine wine... An eye cannot see itself..." So Nashe didn't stab him, though he was scientifically and aesthetically inclined. The man woke up, repelling Nashe's earnest, babbling conversation – the state of Dulston, the last thing you read, how you got those bloodstains, zombie linguistics, our creeping isolation. “Tell me where I find a flak jacket or shut up! I just want to live another day. I'm out.” “Why?” wondered Nashe. “What does your life offer you, or any of us? The hordes haven't reduced you like this. Despite their putrefaction, they give us more than you do.” Seeing the man in the street, Nashe threw down his old copy of Blake's prophecies: “Here. There's a map to a well-stocked armoury inside. I forget which page.” A useless gesture. Grown a little unhinged but retaining his acuity, Nashe now has a near-compulsive need to listen and learn. Perhaps this is why he revives the dead – one of them might, perhaps, restore a little spark to life. It's certainly why he went on to join the Philosophe Knights. After all, they are humanists. But a human is not made of cardboard.
Didattica
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