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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.
Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.
And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
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.
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.
And God suddenly bolts up in His bed with a revelation: everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
He says, “It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”
The Company, having long ago outgrown the concept of God, attempts to explain to these people that their fantasies have cursed their available realities.
“Your fantasies have cursed your realities,” He explains, wringing His hands. “The Company offered you no evidence that it would work; why did you believe them?” Although He doesn’t say it, everyone knows what He’s thinking when He retires to His bed at night: that one of His best gifts—the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter—has backfired.
“I came here for the same reason doctors wear uniforms of long white coats,” He answers. “They don’t do it for their benefit, but for yours.”
They don’t understand they’ve been blessed with insulation from the future, while the sinners are cursed in the blue-green glow of the televisions to witness every moment of it.
Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.
The planet’s memories survive in zeros and ones.
she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else. “Thank you,” you tell the angel. “This I’m used to.”
This is how the world will close, not with a bang but a yawn: sleepy and contented, our own falling eyelids serving as the curtain for the play’s end.
Contrary to the admonition that we cannot take it with us, anything we create becomes part of our afterlife. If it was created, it survives.
This is totally deterministic. Is love simply an operation of the math?
