What Next?
by Julia M. Klein
MARCH 16, 2009 TAGS:
During my mother’s final weeks of illness, a rabbi told her that she could choose to imagine death as an exciting possibility. His intent was to comfort, and perhaps he did. As life’s end nears, religious faith is, above all, utilitarian – a passport through regret and fear to a destination that is still unknown, uncharted.
What wouldn’t we give to know it? Better yet, to know it without being compelled to visit.
In SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Pantheon Books), the neuroscientist David Eagleman does what the rabbi urged on my mother: He lets his imagination run free. In 40 pithy vignettes, he offers variations on the theme of immortality – sketches of theoretical heavens and hells that are really philosophical musings on human striving, yearning, and fallibility.
In his search for meaning, Eagleman casts a cold eye on both life and death, thrusting us into universes tinged with sadness. The presiding deities in these stories are less often omnipotent than blundering and defeated. Their plans dazzle, but veer into blind alleys. The meticulously constructed ideal keeps colliding with reality.
And reality itself is under siege, with fiction, theater and dream knocking at its gates. We are adrift in a territory whose conquistador was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In SUM, human beings may be Actors who recite lines for Beneficiaries before retiring offstage to await their next cue. Or they inhabit one another’s dreams, ancillary characters whose identities remain mysterious. Or they survive only in the form of pre-programmed electronic messages, carrying on relationships in a world that can no longer distinguish the living from the dead.
In SUM, time goes off the rails, and metamorphosis is unpredictable, tragic. Human beings turn into horses, beginning an inevitable evolutionary descent. Or they re-live their earthly existences backwards – only to find their memories of life painfully inaccurate. Eagleman plays, too, with size and scale: In one world, people exist primarily as nutritional backdrops for microbes, while, in another, they expand into gargantuan beings charged with upholding the cosmos.
Summary doesn’t really do justice to the precise inventiveness or mordant wit that flavors this collection. In “Mary,” for example, the second-person protagonist (“you”) arrives in the afterlife to find Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ensconced on a throne, surrounded by angels. Her status derives from the fact that her 1818 novel Frankenstein, about the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the monster he makes, is “God’s favorite book.”
In Eagleman’s vision, God has lost control of his ultimate creation, Man. “He tried to make good things come to good people, and bad to bad,” Eagleman writes, “but He didn’t have the technology to implement it.” Plugging up his ears against Man’s cries for help from pillaged villages and death camps, God spends his time rereading Shelley’s novel. It comforts Him by suggesting that “all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things that they have wrought.”
If even God is in flight from reality, what hope is there for man? Can the human imagination, or memory, transcend death? In “Metamorphosis,” Eagleman posits three deaths: when the body stops functioning, when it is lowered into the grave, and “that moment, sometimes in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” Before that third death, broadcast by the Callers, we linger in a homely lobby that resembles an airport waiting area, with long corridors and fluorescent lighting. “Tragically,” Eagleman writes, “many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering.”
There follows a signature ironic twist: In this limbo world, those remembered for too long, or in the wrong way, wait for their statues to topple and, like passengers stranded between flights, beg for release. Eagleman turns the comforting shibboleth that we live on in other’s memories into a curse: “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.”
Other visions are even more terrifying. In “Scales,” for example, we are “God’s cancer.” In “Mirrors,” Eagleman satirizes the notion that we construct our self-image from other people’s feedback. In this particular Purgatory, all the data from our reflections are pooled, so that “you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.” Another shift of perspective occurs in “Microbe.” In this universe, God has created life in His own image – as a bacterium. Man is now only a “nutritional substrate” – but one who can nevertheless accidentally separate microbes in “mysterious and often cruel ways” that the God of the microbes is at a loss to explain.
The horror in these vignettes is often offset or superceded by humor. “Adhesion” conceives of life as an ongoing experiment to determine why some relationships work and others fail. Giant beings called Collectors observe, ponder, and debrief men and women when they die. They ask, like a querulous matchmaker, “What was wrong with so-and-so, who seemed to have everything you wanted?” In the end, they remain baffled.
Eagleman challenges not only individual faiths – in humanity, religion or technology – but the very notion of faith itself. In “Great Expectations,” he envisions a capitalist afterlife that is “privatized and computerized.” People can download their consciousness into a computer, “choosing an afterlife that is fast, furious and spicy,…where innumerable virgins cheerfully await your arrival.” The only catch: No one has any idea if this download really works.
In fact, in another twist, it turns out that God exists – and the afterlife is really the storied heaven of white clouds and harp-strumming angels. In other words, comparatively dull stuff. In “Great Expectations,” Eagleman has fashioned yet another disappointed God -- one who knows that “one of His best gifts – the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter – has backfired.”
SUM adds up to more than a fanciful set of cosmologies. To counter the metaphysical darkness, Eagleman has given us a sparkling disquisition on the intensity of our need for meaning.
What wouldn’t we give to know it? Better yet, to know it without being compelled to visit. In SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Pantheon Books), the neuroscientist David Eagleman does what the rabbi urged on my mother: He lets his imagination run free. In 40 pithy vignettes, he offers variations on the theme of immortality – sketches of theoretical heavens and hells that are really philosophical musings on human striving, yearning, and fallibility.
In his search for meaning, Eagleman casts a cold eye on both life and death, thrusting us into universes tinged with sadness. The presiding deities in these stories are less often omnipotent than blundering and defeated. Their plans dazzle, but veer into blind alleys. The meticulously constructed ideal keeps colliding with reality.
And reality itself is under siege, with fiction, theater and dream knocking at its gates. We are adrift in a territory whose conquistador was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In SUM, human beings may be Actors who recite lines for Beneficiaries before retiring offstage to await their next cue. Or they inhabit one another’s dreams, ancillary characters whose identities remain mysterious. Or they survive only in the form of pre-programmed electronic messages, carrying on relationships in a world that can no longer distinguish the living from the dead.
In SUM, time goes off the rails, and metamorphosis is unpredictable, tragic. Human beings turn into horses, beginning an inevitable evolutionary descent. Or they re-live their earthly existences backwards – only to find their memories of life painfully inaccurate. Eagleman plays, too, with size and scale: In one world, people exist primarily as nutritional backdrops for microbes, while, in another, they expand into gargantuan beings charged with upholding the cosmos.
Summary doesn’t really do justice to the precise inventiveness or mordant wit that flavors this collection. In “Mary,” for example, the second-person protagonist (“you”) arrives in the afterlife to find Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ensconced on a throne, surrounded by angels. Her status derives from the fact that her 1818 novel Frankenstein, about the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the monster he makes, is “God’s favorite book.”
In Eagleman’s vision, God has lost control of his ultimate creation, Man. “He tried to make good things come to good people, and bad to bad,” Eagleman writes, “but He didn’t have the technology to implement it.” Plugging up his ears against Man’s cries for help from pillaged villages and death camps, God spends his time rereading Shelley’s novel. It comforts Him by suggesting that “all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things that they have wrought.”
If even God is in flight from reality, what hope is there for man? Can the human imagination, or memory, transcend death? In “Metamorphosis,” Eagleman posits three deaths: when the body stops functioning, when it is lowered into the grave, and “that moment, sometimes in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” Before that third death, broadcast by the Callers, we linger in a homely lobby that resembles an airport waiting area, with long corridors and fluorescent lighting. “Tragically,” Eagleman writes, “many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering.”
There follows a signature ironic twist: In this limbo world, those remembered for too long, or in the wrong way, wait for their statues to topple and, like passengers stranded between flights, beg for release. Eagleman turns the comforting shibboleth that we live on in other’s memories into a curse: “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.”
Other visions are even more terrifying. In “Scales,” for example, we are “God’s cancer.” In “Mirrors,” Eagleman satirizes the notion that we construct our self-image from other people’s feedback. In this particular Purgatory, all the data from our reflections are pooled, so that “you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.” Another shift of perspective occurs in “Microbe.” In this universe, God has created life in His own image – as a bacterium. Man is now only a “nutritional substrate” – but one who can nevertheless accidentally separate microbes in “mysterious and often cruel ways” that the God of the microbes is at a loss to explain. The horror in these vignettes is often offset or superceded by humor. “Adhesion” conceives of life as an ongoing experiment to determine why some relationships work and others fail. Giant beings called Collectors observe, ponder, and debrief men and women when they die. They ask, like a querulous matchmaker, “What was wrong with so-and-so, who seemed to have everything you wanted?” In the end, they remain baffled.
Eagleman challenges not only individual faiths – in humanity, religion or technology – but the very notion of faith itself. In “Great Expectations,” he envisions a capitalist afterlife that is “privatized and computerized.” People can download their consciousness into a computer, “choosing an afterlife that is fast, furious and spicy,…where innumerable virgins cheerfully await your arrival.” The only catch: No one has any idea if this download really works.
In fact, in another twist, it turns out that God exists – and the afterlife is really the storied heaven of white clouds and harp-strumming angels. In other words, comparatively dull stuff. In “Great Expectations,” Eagleman has fashioned yet another disappointed God -- one who knows that “one of His best gifts – the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter – has backfired.”
SUM adds up to more than a fanciful set of cosmologies. To counter the metaphysical darkness, Eagleman has given us a sparkling disquisition on the intensity of our need for meaning.
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