*
It was not, she reflected, that one could cut open a teddy bear and find, embedded in the bear, a miniature hippocampus built of cloth. Sentience in the world was not like that.
It was not that the stuffed animal’s eyes filled with tears when he sat in the presence of one’s sorrow.
Sentience was not so localized, not so easy to find. And that was the issue really.
If the human were really part of the animal world, as the naturalists liked to insist, that meant that the mysteries – the irreducibles of the spirit – could not just be isolated in the human head and then bullied and besieged in their isolated place. Sentience was God’s doing and it surfaced in the world even where no human head was present.
The encounter between a child and a little animal was suffused with feeling. Not merely the child. Not merely the animal. The encounter itself. At least this was what she, the mother, had encountered.
This was the mysterious treasure that Body kept safe in her scented sandalwood box, knowing all the time that it could not be kept in a box.
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