Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman

Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy.

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.

only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.

The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.

you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.

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.

And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

The atheists and the theists agreed that it is only through us that He lives.

“It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”

“Your fantasies have cursed your realities,”

she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else. “Thank you,” you tell the angel. “This I’m used to.”

They long ago realized that the optimal method for achieving a planet-wide map was to drop countless little rugged mobile devices that multiply quickly and carry themselves to all the reaches of the globe. To ensure we spread widely on the surface,

they made us restless, longing, lusty, and fecund.

He has created an engineering marvel that only takes pictures of itself.