After finishing this book in November of 2022, I wrote,

 

"I read fiction, but it's usually my bedtime reading, either a legal or spy thriller, nothing to quote from. The author of this book, however, has written forty tales of what life after death could be. Highly colorful, these stories are mind-bending and thought-provoking. These excerpts will give you some taste of that."

 

My clippings below collapse a 130-page book into 6 pages, measured by using 12-point type in Microsoft Word.

​

See all my book recommendations.  

​

Here are the selections I made:

​

In the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of life. She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into good and evil. But it didn’t take long for Her to realize that humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and mean-spirited in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who to Hell?

 

Might not it be possible, She considered, that a man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men’s lives? Might not a child unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family?

 

Dividing the population into two categories—good and bad—seemed like a more reasonable task when She was younger, but with experience these decisions became more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh hundreds of factors, and ran computer programs that rolled out long strips of paper with eternal decisions. But Her sensitivities revolted at this automation—and when the computer generated a decision She disagreed with, She took the opportunity to kick out the plug in rage. That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring na...

This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

 

She knew Her humans were multidimensional, and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices. Not all gods suffer over this; we can consider ourselves lucky that in death we answer to a God with deep sensitivity to the byzantine hearts of Her creations. For months She moped around Her living room in Heaven, head drooped like a bulrush, while the lines piled up. Her advisors advised Her...

This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

 

In a moment of desperation the thought crossed Her mind to let everyone wait on line indefinitely, letting them work it out on their own. But then a better idea struck Her generous spirit. She could afford it: She would grant everyone, every last human, a place in Heaven. After all, everyone had something good inside; it was part of the design specifications. Her new plan brought back the bounce to Her gait, returned the color to Her cheeks. She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the Devil, and brought every last human to be by Her side in Heaven. Newcomers or old-timers, nefarious or righteous: under the new system, everyone gets equal time to speak with Her. Most people find Her a little garrulous and oversolicitous, but She cannot be accused of not caring. The most important aspect of Her new system is that everyone is treated equally. There is no longer fire for some and harp music for others. The afterli... (less)

This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

 

The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote. So God sits on the edge of...

This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

 

In the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life. Would you like to be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles? But perhaps you’ve just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you, and now there’s only one thing you yearn for: simplicity. That’s permissible. So for the next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow-flicking tail or the steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow-blanketed plains.

 

You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse.

 

Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse.

 

And that’s not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won’t have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won’t understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.

 

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

 

So you wait in this lobby until the third death. There are long tables with coffee, tea, and cookies; you can help yourself. There are people here from all around the world, and with a little effort you can strike up convivial small talk. Just be aware that your conversation may be interrupted at any moment by the Callers, who broadcast your new friend’s name to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the Earth. Your friend slumps, face like a shattered and reglued plate, saddened even though the Callers tell him kindly that he’s off to a better place. No one knows where that better place is or what it offers, because no one exiting through that door has returned to tell us. Tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering. We all wag our heads at that typical timing.

 

Not everyone is sad when the Callers enter the room and shout out the next list of names. On the contrary, some people beg and plead, prostrating themselves at the Callers’ feet. These are generally the folks who have been here a long time, too long, especially those who are remembered for unfair reasons. For example, take the farmer over there, who drowned in a small river two hundred years ago. Now his farm is the site of a small college, and the tour guides each week tell his story. So he’s stuck and he’s miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He is utterly alienated from his name; it is no longer identical with him but continues to bind. The cheerless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart were complicated. The gray-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall.

 

And that is the curse of this room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

 

Even with the aid of our modern deductive skills, it is impossible to imagine our own death. It is not because we lack insight, but because the concept of death is made up. There is no such thing. This will become clear to you at some point, when you get into a situation that you think should kill you—say, a severe car crash. You’ll be surprised to realize that it didn’t hurt. The witnesses around you will laugh and help you up and brush off the glass and explain the situation. The situation is that the people around you are Actors. Your interactions with other people were almost entirely scripted from their point of view. Your “afterlife,” if you want to call it that, is your initiation to the game. 

 

We realize this moment of disclosure will be hard on you. For God’s sake, you will think as you pick yourself up from the car wreck, what about my lover? What was our relationship based on? Were all the nighttime whispers fabrications? Rehearsed lines? And all my friends: Actors? My parents: pretending? Don’t despair. It’s not as bad as you think. If you think you were the only uninitiated one while all the rest were Actors, you’re not quite correct. About half the people are Actors, and the rest, like you until moments ago, are the Beneficiaries. So it is equally likely that your lover was in the same naive boat you were—and now it is your responsibility to become an Actor for her, so that she detects no change in the relationship. You will become like an adulterous spouse striving to force normal behavior. You may have to be an Actor for other Beneficiaries as well: your boss, your cabdriver, your waitress. 

 

As an Actor, you get to see the backs of things. When you finish a conversation with a Beneficiary and exit the room, you find yourself in a backstage waiting area, where slanted two-by-fours hold up the unfinished backs of walls. There are couches here, and you can get snacks from vending machines. You make small talk with other Actors while you wait for your next appearance. Your next appearance will be, say, at 12:53 p.m. for what appears to be a coincidental run-in with someone on the subway. Before each appearance, you are given a small script on a note card. Generally the instructions are vague. For example, you may be instructed to feign surprise when you run into the Beneficiary; perhaps you will also be instructed to pretend you have just bought a dog or, alternatively, to act as though work is weighing on your mind. Other times the instructions include something quite specific: you are to me... (less)

This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

 

So you memorize your brief script, and when you walk back through the door you will be wherever you are next needed: the restaurant bathroom, or the museum gift shop where your friend is waiting to meet you, or perhaps a bustling sidewalk where you are to be spotted arm in arm with another Actor. For the Beneficiaries, the back sides of all doors are constructed just before they enter; for the Actors, all the doors of the world are our portal into and out of this waiting room. We don’t know how the Directors dynamically construct the world, much less for what purpose. We are only told that our obligation here as Actors will eventually end, and then we will move on to a better place. You may decide you’re not willing to uphold this continuous lie to the Beneficiaries. You may yell into the Directors’ intercom that you won’t be their deceitful stool... (less)

This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

 

Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don’t we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth? One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You’re slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility. But in truth there is a deeper reason you play your part so convincingly. If you play your part well, you can more quickly leave this acting job. Those with the best behavior are rewarded with ignorance: they are reincarnated as an uninitiated Beneficiary. You could permanently blow ... (less)

This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

 

There is no afterlife, but a version of us lives on nonetheless. At the beginning of the computer era, people died with passwords in their heads and no one could access their files. When access to these files was critical, companies could grind to a halt. That’s when programmers invented death switches. With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your password is automatically emailed to the second-in-command. Individuals began to use death switches to reveal Swiss bank account numbers to their heirs, to get the last word in an argument, and to confess secrets that were unspeakable during their lifetime. It soon became appreciated that death switches provided a good opportunity to say good-bye electronically. Instead of sending out passwords, people began programming their computers to send emails to their friends announcing their own death. “It appears I’m dead now,” the email would begin. “I’ll take this as an opportunity to tell you things I’ve always wanted to express …”