Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
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Read between December 3 - December 7, 2024
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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.
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And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
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We forever live in the dreams of the next generation.
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What’s the problem with this? There is a woman in my dreams whom I see every night, but I can never catch up with her, passing as we do into our next worlds.
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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.
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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.
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We felt honored at first to be the cells that form God’s body, but then it became clearer that we are God’s cancer.
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everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
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It is a face that looks like your father and like your mother; it commands the knowledge of a thousand scholars, the empathy of a thousand lovers, the mystery of a thousand strangers.
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He says, “It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”
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much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others.
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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.
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People come to discover that the end of death is the death of motivation.
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But eventually it comes to be appreciated that not just the finitude of life but also the surprise timing of death is critical to motivation. So people begin to set ranges for their death dates. In this new framework, their friends throw surprise parties for them—like birthday parties—except they jump out from behind the couch and kill them. Since you never know when your friends are going to schedule your party, it reinstills the carpe diem attitude of former years. Unfortunately, people begin to abuse the surprise-party system to extinguish their enemies under the protection of ...more
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“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.”
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As you wait in line and strike up a conversation with the woman behind you, you discover that the afterlife was long ago given over to committees.
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This may lead you to assume that God doesn’t exist—but you’d be wrong. It’s simply that He doesn’t know we exist.
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Our death is unnoteworthy and unobserved by the microbes, who merely redistribute onto different food sources. So although we supposed ourselves to be the apex of evolution, we are merely the nutritional substrate.
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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.
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The death switches simulate the society so completely that the entire social network is reconstructable. The planet’s memories survive in zeros and ones.