Life Force

[teenybuffalo]

 "I always pictured Life as this great crackling formless thing," said Miss Flitworth nervously.  "Like an electrical storm in trousers."

--Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (paraphrased from memory because I don't have the book at hand)

I've been wondering about this for a while.  There are certain terms that supernatural horror readers/writers tend to

Comments

[teenybuffalo]

life is the ability to fully use both body and mind

What a dumb thing to say. It must have been late at night when I came up with that one. If that's what "life" is, then I agree with what you just said, and I'd go further--if that's true, then everybody's a little bit dead. But it doesn't work that way. There's no way I'd say that someone who's wheelchair-bound or missing a limb or other physical bits is "partly dead"--though I realize what I said sounds like that interpretation. And how am I going to define "full use of your mind"? We could probably come up with a working definition for a court of law, but still it's impossible to quantify in a way that's useful here.
The only ways I feel competent to define "life" by examples of its presence or absence involve imaginary creatures, as above. To tell the truth, I hadn't really thought about applying it to real-life experiences beyond my own.

Which still leaves me unable to define what "life" is. Try "the ability to experience things". Still vague. It's one of those things that you know it by its absence. "It's easy to point out a spider on the wall but very hard to prove that the room is spider-free."--Dave Langford.

The zombies-as-Alzheimer's-sufferers story is one I still haven't read. It sounds incredibly depressing (and my contrarian nature is going, "OK, so why not just write a story about Alzheimer's sufferers in the first place and leave zombies out of it?" but I should read the darn thing before I judge it unduly).