The passings

Self's less than a soul, I'm convinced of this.  But it's at least a linguistic construct, and maybe more like a manuscript, an inscription on materiality capable of some degree of replication, certainly of persistence beyond its first instantiation.

So what do we lose of other selves when our own efforts to inscribe them within our worlds are subverted by death?  Contingency, the texture of a world giving itself to us rather than being clarified as an effort of imagination.  That texture is more than comforting; it is fundamentally enabling, like a limb.  The deaths of those close to us are like the losses of limbs; their continuing felt presences are phantom limbs.