What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable; in action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

When I was eleven years old a friend of mine took a volunteer job at an aviary, and when I visited her I saw cages full of tiny baby mice, days old, in between the wild parrots and fledgling hawks. They were food for the birds. I don’t remember now if I asked her to do this or if she simply did it of her own accord after a cry of incoherent compassion escaped me, but for some reason she decided to ask the keeper who supervised her for permission to give me one of these doomed morsels of life.

“It’s very unlikely that it will survive,” she said as she placed it gently on a piece of cotton wool. “But you can keep it warm for a few days, and try feeding it milk with this eye dropper.”

So I did. It was an irrational act: the little pink comma was very small, and the odds against it very great. Its heart beat faintly inside its translucent skin; it was so light the whole of it was nothing but a faint tremble of possibility. Three or four days later, it died.

My parents were out, and my sister was in her room busy being fourteen. We still lived in our first house on the 8th floor of an apartment building, above a large green lawn of shared play space. I wrapped the dead baby mouse in tissue and took the elevator downstairs with it in my hands, careful not to crush its nothing body or its nothing little bones on the way. I walked as far across the grass as I could, until I reached a tree under which I was fairly certain no one could see me. I had no spade. I didn’t even have a spoon. I dug in the hard dirt with my hands and buried my bundle in a shallow grave.

I didn’t say anything. The mouse hadn’t been a pet, really; it hadn’t been much of anything. Not enough of anything to love, anyway. But my heart beat fast. It was a strange thrill to be burying a thing that yesterday had been alive and today was dead. I dusted my hands off on my pants and went upstairs.

Then, as sometimes happens when you are eleven, I found myself in the grip of an obsession I couldn’t shake, and twice before my parents came home I had to go back downstairs and dig up my tissue-wrapped mouse to see if it was still alive. It was an odd feeling that compelled me to do this, not really related to compassion or pity or fear. And it wasn’t hope, either—I didn’t want to discover that the pathetic little scrap of flesh had been reanimated.

I think I just conceived of the dead body, fragile and cold and unresponsive, as being extraordinarily bizarre. Lifelessness seemed like such an impossible property for a body to have that having buried the thing, I found that I just couldn’t be sure it would retain that property permanently. It was entirely possible—and indeed probable, I felt—that life would invade again.

I knew about death, of course, and I suppose I understood it, intellectually. I knew that everything died eventually. But what I think I must have felt that day was that life was the more powerful force, and that the mouse body simply didn’t make sense without it. A lump of matter that was supposed to be alive, and therefore qualitatively different from all the other lumps of matter in the world, was suddenly just the same: inanimate, insensate, incapable of protesting when you buried it beneath the earth. What a tremendously incomprehensible trespass of boundaries. Why wouldn’t I have been convinced that I might just have been imagining it?

In one way my feelings haven’t changed since I was eleven: seeing the dead human body on display, I feel in myself the same sense of odd displacement. These organs like paper flowers; these stretching muscles; this soft brain tissue; this strange fire of nerves; this skin flapping like paper; they are all fascinating, all beautiful in a way, even split open and stark—but cold, dead, preserved, none of them entirely makes sense.

Separated from the force of life, whatever that is, the body becomes nothing more than an oddly messy object. To be sure, it is an extraordinary object; an object of wonder and perhaps even of affection. But it is an object just the same. It is a bit of a crazy thing to stand staring into the eyes of a dead human being and realize that what you are feeling is not reverence or awe, but the same curiosity you feel when you see any other museum artifact.

I do wonder if Gunther von Hagen ever found himself tiptoeing back into his lab at night and poking his row of plastinated bodies one by one to see if life had, in fact, invaded again.