What Makes Life Alive: Vassily Grossman on Consciousness, Freedom, and Kindness

“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones:

What is life?

Where does it begin and end?

What makes it alive?

But in the epochs since, having discovered muons and mitochondria, having discerned the elementary building blocks of matter and the synaptic infrastructure of the mind, we — “atoms with consciousness,” in physicist Richard Feynman’s poetic words — seem to be haunted all the...