Comments | teenybuffalo: Life Force

teenybuffalo

Life Force

Feb 26, 2011 23:54

"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 ( Read more... )

authors: tim powers, books: toothless, film yak, wolf man, books: expiration date, zombies, webcomics, werewolves

Comments 2

negothick February 27 2011, 20:58:22 UTC

Phew--your post has enough hooks to catch Leviathan, but talk about hitting all the serious subjects! On LJ, you might catch Leviathan, but you might also get more comments on a cute kitty picture.

SO I'll be a coward and just respond to your last line: You're in dangerous waters (sorry to keep overusing that metaphor). If "life" requires the full use of body and mind, the world is full of zombies already--with more every day. Facing our own inevitable decay through aging and the thousand shocks the flesh is heir: now there's horror for you! At the Boskone zombie panel, someone mentioned a story where zombification is a metaphor for Alzheimer's, and I agree with that. Yet Alzheimer's sufferers cling to life, as do any number of terminally ill or institutionalized people.
I do agree that when people say "Full of life" they don't mean any of the above categories, and you're right to point out that "Life" doesn't necessarily mean "pleasurable life."

teenybuffalo February 27 2011, 22:21:33 UTC

life is the ability to fully use both body and mindWhat 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 ( ... )