Soul food

A propos my entry of the day before, I have come up against more and more young people (in the university-age category) who are unfamiliar with the children�s literature classics I and my generation grew up on. I was telling my story about sending off the complete works of H.C.A. to the nice young man who sits next to me in Latin class, and he confessed that he too only knows the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, which prompted me to tell him the story in the parking lot behind the student union building. He was amazed that the protagonist actually dies, but while I was relating the ending, it occured to me that the story was about gaining an immortal soul, not about getting the prince.

There is another story I love which I think would make a great opera called The Kith of the Elf-Folk by Lord Dunsany (1916) in which a Wild Thing which lives in a marsh by a cathedral suddenly contrives a desire to have a soul. Its fellows feel sorry for it, and make it a soul out of a piece of spider-spun gossamer, spangled with dew and brought to life with the voices of lovers and the dawn chorus of birds. As soon as the soul is pressed against the Wild Thing�s left breast, it becomes a beautiful young woman. She is taken in by a farmer and his wife and eventually becomes a famous opera singer.

After a time, however, she tires of the world of men and desires to return to the marshes from whence she came, but cannot do so until she rids herself of the dew-bespangled soul. Only someone who doesn�t already have one can take it from her and she is stuck with it, until, during a performance, the star suddenly leaves the stage, rushes into the audience and says to Celia, Countess of Birmingham, who was enjoying a chatty conversation with her friend: �Take my soul, it is a beautiful soul. It can worship God, and knows the meaning of music and can imagine Paradise. �See, it is a beautiful soul.� �And she clutched at her left breast a little above the heart, and there was the soul shining in her hand, with the green and blue lights going round and round and the purple flare in the midst."

�Please offer it to some one else,� Lady Birmingham said.
�But they all have souls already,� said Signorina Russiano.

In the end the countess accepts the soul and the Wild Thing is set free, leaping out of its costume, out of the opera house, over the countryside and back to its beloved marshes.

You can see why this story would make a great opera. You can also see why I think that souls are overrated.

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