Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman

You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books.

Three months doing laundry.

Three days calculating restaurant tips.

Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator.

Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time.

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.

Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.

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.

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

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.

Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you’ve ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.

He envies man his brief twinkling of a life, and those He dislikes are condemned to suffer immortality with Him.

The head engineer is fired. He has created an engineering marvel that only takes pictures of itself.

He realizes that everyone is knocking over dominoes willy-nilly: no one knows where it leads.

And thus your punishment is cleverly and automatically regulated in the afterlife: the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with.

By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here.