If the answer was "alive," she would close her hand and kill the bird.
As to whether I could have published a totally honest essay about my mother while she was alive, the answer is no.
Well, at first glance, you might think the answer is, look, you exist, you're alive, whatever it is — ;as I said, I'm just going to be loose now, I'm going to put aside all the careful distinctions I just drew — I'm still around as long as my body is P-functioning.
In Mr. Twist's animist "Petrushka" the answer is yes; everything seems alive and in motion.
The answer is surely that anything that can die seems alive, and anything that seems alive will sometime die.
The answer is: we don't know, nor do we know if Pip is alive.
"What keeps a man alive?" For him the answer is affection for others, memories of home, language itself and some dim hope of survival.
Once the system has collapsed, the information it holds is no longer a dream or a secret or a strange cat at once alive and dead; the answer is then just an ordinary thing we can read off a screen.
The most dramatic example was that the first time I went to Nagasaki for the film I saw a plaque near ground zero that says, 'Everyone who was within 1 km of here died instantly, except for one eight-year-old girl.' I said, 'Can she still be alive?' The answer was maybe.
I didn't even know she was alive". Well, the answer was quite simple for me, at least.
