Kindle Notes & Highlights
The trees are still there, now bare or getting there, but the grass is almost entirely gone: it’s now a sickly yellowing orange, almost burnt. It looks the way that lawns used to look in the summertime after kids had played on them: hard, dry soil patches, like liver-spotted scalp peering through thinning hair.
This is mortality, he said. Life and death. We’d never force somebody to stay married to a corpse. When a person loses this much of themselves, they have lost their soul. And what is left when you have no soul?
It’s quite shocking, the first time you see him, because it’s not like seeing a disabled man. There’s no life in him. When you look at the vacant, there’s something wrong, and you can tell. It’s immediate. It’s what the overly religious factions who oppose the Machine use as evidence: they present the intangibility of the soul as proof of the existence of something less tangible still.
