A Christian theological subtext underlies Laura’s lamentations about being deprived of a body in her cybernetic afterlife. Many visions of the afterlife in Western culture involved a disembodied soul, a de-corporealized selfhood as it were. Plato gave us the most sublime version of that wholly spiritual or noetic afterlife. Yet Christianity introduced a different hope or expectation into the equation, one which convinced Saint Augustine, who had been sold on Plato’s philosophy, to convert to Christianity. Why?  

Because Christianity promised a resurrection of the body. Bodies are the locus of identity. Without bodies there is no recognition. In Dante’s paradise the beatified souls, who exist as points of light, anticipate with surplus of joy the resurrection of their flesh at the end of time. Their bliss is in fact imperfect until they recover in time what time has robbed them of, that is, the bodily matter with which their personal identities and appearances were bound up. Until the restitution of their bodies at the end of time the blessed in Dante’s heaven, they cannot properly recognize one another, as they long to do with their loved ones.  

In Paradiso 14 Dante writes of the two groups of saints he meets:

“So ready and eager to cry ‘Amen’
did one chorus and the other seem to me
that clearly they showed their desire for their dead bodies,
not just for themselves but for their mothers,
and fathers, and the others who were dear to them
before they became sempiternal flames.” 

In that respect all of us on Earth, insofar as we are in our bodies, are more blessed than the saints in Dante’s heaven, not only because we have the extraordinary blessing of proprioperception[1] (which Laura desperately desires), but because we also have the extraordinary capacity to recognize one another in our individuation.

[1] Proprioperceptio, otherwise known as kinesthesia, is your body’s ability to sense movement, action, and location. Proprioception is crucial for balance, posture, and coordination while standing.