I'm Adeli Mone and this is The Slowdown.

The problem of the soul, oh what fun.

We poets in case you haven't noticed, love to try our hand at figuring out what the

soul is, where it is, where it goes when we die, how we can tap into it, how we can call

on the soul.

For a long time, I had trouble with the word soul, as if the idea of it belonged only

to those grand and godly church domes and golden cathedrals that seemed more interested

in saving money than saving what they called souls.

Talking about soul is almost as hard as talking about the mind.

Where is the mind, can you point to it and is it different from the brain?

When we talk about the soul, we start to talk about the essence of a human being or an animal,

some part of a being that is immortal, that is beyond the body, the flesh and the bone.

And yet it remains an abstraction, something we cannot point to and say that, that is

a soul.

This conundrum is one for the ages.

The Portuguese writer Josie Sademagl wrote, inside us there is something that has no name.

Not something is what we are.

This seems clear enough.

The soul is the part of you that you cannot name.

One of the reasons I love the obsession that writers have with the soul is that their

interest is not confined to what happens to the soul after you die.

Rather, writers seem to be interested in what the soul is doing right now.

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