He added that, considering her injuries, she really ought to be dead. He was right. She was tragically prehumous; since she was a reader, most people she cared about were dead or fictional. In Valéry, Phaedrus complained that he couldn’t hear or see in the underworld, and Socrates replied, Perhaps you are not sufficiently dead. Always it was the freckle of vulgar life, bringing pain, seeming to persist no matter what, that denied her the immortality of death.
