Robert Davies was my husband’s friend and colleague from the days when software engineer was their cutting-edge profession. Robert fell for a Chinese girl, and as he was being pulled inexorably toward China – she being from a one-child family with aging parents – he stopped by with her for a visit. It was the first time I’d met him, and we hit it off like a house on fire. We both loved to debate and explore ideas. No guessing what he would come up with next, but whatever it was, it would be brilliantly argued. I was preparing lunch one day when he came to find me in the kitchen. He told me that he was engaged in a project – collecting souls. He wanted to buy my soul. He was offering $100. I said, “Sure.” What the hell.
Now this was back in the day – 1993 I think – and one hundred dollars wasn’t nothing. I see on Google that one hundred 1993 dollars is worth $230.92 today. That was a full propane tank or a number of tires. While Robert had the money at the ready, I can doubt that he thought I’d accept the proposition. He might have wanted to catch me in a hypocritical retreat from “I’m a material girl living in a material world,” a belief Madonna and I favor. But I’m sincere: I don’t think any part of me is going to survive death, highly deserving as I may be of eternal attention from the cosmos. And, if I do have some bit that can never die, and there is a bad place that bit might have to spend eternity, I still don’t fear that my frivolous acceptance of a dangled $100 could consign its fate. The scales must be calibrated for heavier loads than that.
Robert, being as he was, clearly found my acceptance delightful, even if squirming would have been more so. He wrote up a bill of sale, I signed it, and he handed over a crisp $100 bill. If there had been a picture taken, the smiles, money, and certificate exchange would have resembled a car dealership giving a check to United Fund.
Whither my soul then? To complicate a thought experiment on that subject, once in China, Robert, tragically, proceeded to drop dead on the Star Ferry as it traversed the fragrant harbor from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon. Was my soul spirited off, tethered to his, to wherever his soul was going? And had he found other takers, and were our souls all off together? If mine didn’t go with him, is it part of his estate until my death and does a certain Chinese woman have it, so to speak, tucked away in a lockbox along with some pictures of Robert and some share certificates from Enron? Our attempts to imaginatively construct for ourselves a loftier fate than the one that befalls a dead earthworm can get us into a mental snarl pretty expeditiously.
Some reports date the first soul selling to the 500s when a disgruntled churchman sold his to get back the job from which his bishop had sacked him. The Virgin Mary redeemed it. The necromancer, alchemist, and magician, Doctor Johann Georg Faust, 1480-1540, reputedly sold his and became famous enough for it to inspire Christopher Marlowe to write the hit play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.
Robert was playing the role of the devil but hardly giving out traditional perks. Two hundred thirty-one today-dollars, rounding up, hardly compares with forbidden knowledge, riches, fame, or legendary blues chips. And, of course, the deal rests upon after-death existence, albeit under the worst possible conditions. With a decent respect for the opinions of mankind thrown to the winds, it is entertaining for me to contemplate the stories we tell ourselves about the Beyond our souls will inhabit.
Even Marlowe’s Faustus says, “Come, I think hell’s a fable.” (He gets proven wrong, of course.) Like Marlowe, Christians have all but given up thinking of eternal hellfire as anything more than a wish for the fate of people we can’t stand. Afterlife seems to be for sweet reunion with select relatives, but certainly not all of them. Fuzzy offerings like merging with the void or the blissful contemplation of God’s countenance don’t let souls keep their personalities or let their departed loved ones’ souls keep theirs, as they wait for reunion, and consequently don’t have all that much comforting appeal.
If belief in life after death is getting wobbly in the West, is it the same elsewhere? The Koran is absolutely unequivocal as to a soul’s after-death fate. At least a third of the text is devoted to the gruesome tortures the unbeliever’s soul must expect, while paradise is described as a male desert-dweller’s sybaritic dream. Last interviews with suicide bombers tell us that that medieval mindset is still going strong for some. Believers in reincarnation, another major contender for a soul’s continuation, can contemplate good and bad outcomes after death, along with infinite opportunities to achieve the better offer. That offer is Nirvana, entirely amorphous and lacking any reunion with loved ones, and the worst offer is more life! There’s even the goal that the next life will be good – except for Tibetans, what with the prospect of a new go-round, yet again, with rancid butter in your tea.
Shakespeare – that is, (never wanting to forego a plug) most likely Edward deVere, 17th Earl of Oxford – considered eternal existence in a sonnet that begins: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? The final couplet:
So long as men can breathe and eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
And that, I think, is as long as our existence can get. Dear, funny Robert. There’s a soul that lives on, cherished in my memory but after all these years, I must admit, mostly because he bought mine, an unforgettable event.
The Western world in no way neglects the soul and the selling of it. South Park is going big with it this season. We toss the accusation of soul-selling right and left, we soul-search during the dark night of the soul. Things are soulful or soulless. Sometimes we are lucky enough to find a soul mate with whom, perhaps, to eat soul food. But we do need a name for our truest selves, and we do need a metaphor for letting selfishness overwhelm what we know to be right. The gleam of hope for God’s special care, the glow of the promise of everlasting life still illuminate the word soul, even if we lose faith in those ideas.
Oh, dear. Here’s an unattractive thought: When I mused upon the soul-selling incident and imagined the use of that $100, I thought of buying propane or tires – fossil fuel and fossil-based equipment for my personal mobile internal combustion engine – what but the Faustian bargain we collectively made when we traded our progenies’ and planet’s future for the comforts coal, oil, and gas brought. Okay, we were ignorant once upon a time, but we haven’t been for quite a while. Would we go back in any meaningful way? Not on your (eternal) life, we wouldn’t. There’s more than one way to sell your soul.
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