The concept of a soul probably resonates with you if you’re reading a newsletter about beauty. The body ages, but the soul does not. As Yeats puts it, the (soul) is “…fastened to a dying animal”.
Whether or not we use the word “soul”, it’s endlessly compelling to observe the life, emotion, and presence in the eyes of another human or another animal.
In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman invents a particularly moving way of viewing the soul:
As a child, you have a daemon, which always takes the physical form of an animal, its sex opposite to yours. Like any close friend, you and your daemon are inseparable - literally, in fact. Moving too far apart from it will cause unbearable emotional pain. Although you can sense each others’ thoughts and feelings, you talk to each other throughout the day.
Your daemon can change shape at will to that of any animal, but when you become an adult, it will settle into a particular animal and will not change again.
What I like about the conceit of a daemon is that is makes the soul visible, foregrounding our normally invisible interactions with it. In real life, a soul can in effect be taken from someone; in the books, this can happen physically. And part of the pleasure of reading them is to witness the compassion and love people and their daemons can show towards each other - a touching reminder that we can nurture ourselves by accepting our own natures and avoiding being at war with ourselves.