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Two lovers gaze at each other, looking more like stone statues than living bodies, hands "cimented" together, while their souls communicate in silence.1 In the poem "The Extasie," John Donne invents a word to name this experience: "When love, with one another so / Interinanimates two soules" (lines 41-2). Readings of the term "[i]nterinanimate[]" usually emphasize the mutually enlivening mixture of two lovers' souls, understood through both Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian psychology.2 "Interinanimation" builds on another word coined by Donne, "inanimation," which he uses repeatedly as a synonym for spiritual quickening.3 But the flipside is always there: "inanimate," the root of Donne's invented compound word "interinanimation," can be heard as a verb or an adjective (a verb meaning "to infuse life into" or an adjective meaning "lifeless").4 This essay is about the moments in Donne's poetry when those two meanings converge. Just a few stanzas later in "The Extasie," interinanimation hinges on the famous metaphor of the lovers' still-frozen bodies turned into books: "Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, / But yet the body is his booke" (lines 71-2). The speaker has turned to the body as if leafing through pages in a book: "To'our bodies turn wee then" (line 69). Interinanimation is about the mysterious properties of immaterial souls, but love's most spiritual mysteries also lead the poem's lovers to recognize their affinity with worldly, material things. Books, as they appear in "The Extasie," open this question: What happens when love's interinanimating effect puts life in a confrontation with lifelessness (a category I will call "nonlife" for the rest of this essay)? By nonlife, I mean a realm that cannot be explained as death or immortality, a category at once alien and quotidian, including inanimate things that persist with or without living beings.5 Across Donne's poetry, books are the worldly things that shuttle between animate and inanimate, with figural books often revealing an interaction between life and nonlife that takes place in the literal (textual material) book.
Throughout this essay, my argument turns on moments when a book presents nonlife as something distinct from either eternal life or death. For example, paper is rarely just dead stuffin Donne's poems; similarly, it is too vulnerable to be immortal. In the verse letter "To Mrs M....