In the Hoge Veluwe national park (which has more than 40km of dedicated bike roads) I cycled through silent forests, got lost on bike roads for what felt like hours without seeing another soul, and encountered a sounder* of wild boar.
The Neo-Platonists (such as Plotinus, 205-270) taught a world-system of emanation, whereby the One (like Plato's Form of the Good) flowed into Intellect (the realm of the Forms) and from there into the World-Soul and individual souls, where it encountered the realm of bodies, from where it returned to itself ('the flight of the alone to the alone').
The only souls we encounter are a couple of old blokes looking for drink and a middle-aged woman with four chocolate-coloured labradors, all of whom, save one hound, smile in bafflement and walk on.
My connection to our country and society manifests in the food I cook and the stories I write about the faces and souls I encounter.
But what happens when one of these people, whose only talent is a particularly obnoxious form of noisy narcissism, actually finds an audience beyond the poor souls they encounter in their everyday lives?
The characters on Yoga Partners remind me of the kind of well-meaning souls I have encountered in my yoga trysts.
Perkus hadn't encountered another soul in the hours he'd been installed in the Friendreth, had only gazed through immovable paint-sealed windows at minute human forms picking through drifts on the Sixty-fifth Street sidewalk seven stories below, the city a distant stilled terrarium.
3. Francesca and Paolo in Dante's Inferno The fact that Dante encountered the souls of these two doomed lovers whirling around the second circle of hell might seem to disqualify them from my jolly little band here.
Despite those occurrences, some of my most human connections (and best stories) come from the similar souls whom I've encountered on my travels.
Albert dares to approach Helen — asking her to "walk out" with him in the city's parks and shopping districts — because he has encountered a kindred soul in the person of Hubert Page, a housepainter engaged by Mrs. Baker to do some sprucing up.
