I read Sum, too. Amazing. I also particularly liked the chapter Quantum.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote:
>
> Since everybody's talking about the afterlife lately, here are a few
> excerpts from the smartest book I've read on the subject in some time,
> David Eagleman's "Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives." The second one
> got a laugh out of me when I discovered it today because only yesterday
> I proposed a similar scenario.
>
>
> Sum
>
> In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with
> the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a
> quality are grouped together.
>
> You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven
> months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your
> eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting
> on a toilet.
>
> You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it.
> Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it
> through, it's agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
>
> But that doesn't mean it's always pleasant. 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. Your eyes hurt, and you itch,
> because you can't take a shower until it's your time to take
> your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens
> when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven
> hours of confusion. One hour realizing you've forgotten
> someone's name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days
> lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting.
> Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry.
> Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces.
> Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days
> calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine
> days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting
> money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days
> longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in
> thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with
> your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and
> zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you
> reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you
> imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is
> blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces,
> where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping
> from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on
> the burning sand.
>
> Egalitaire
>
> In the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of
> life. She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured
> Her universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization
> of people into good and evil. But it didn't take long for Her to
> realize that humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously
> corrupt and meanspirited in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who
> goes to Heaven and who to Hell? Might not it be possible, She
> considered, that a man could be an embezzler and still give to
> charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress but bring
> pleasure and security to two men's lives? Might not a child
> unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family? Dividing the
> population into two categoriesgood and badseemed like a more
> reasonable task when She was younger, but with experience these
> decisions became more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh
> hundreds of factors, and ran computer programs that rolled out long
> strips of paper with eternal decisions. But Her sensitivities revolted
> at this automationand when the computer generated a decision She
> disagreed with, She took the opportunity to kick out the plug in rage.
> That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two
> warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate
> grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and
> moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional, and She
> could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful
> choices.
>
> Not all gods suffer over this; we can consider ourselves lucky that in
> death we answer to a God with deep sensitivity to the byzantine hearts
> of Her creations. For months She moped around Her living room in
> Heaven, head drooped like a bulrush, while the lines piled up. Her
> advisors advised Her to delegate the decision making, but She loved Her
> humans too much to leave them to the care of anyone else.
>
> In a moment of desperation the thought crossed Her mind to let everyone
> wait on line indefinitely, letting them work it out on their own. But
> then a better idea struck Her generous spirit. She could afford it: She
> would grant everyone, every last human, a place in Heaven. After all,
> everyone had something good inside; it was part of the design
> specifications. Her new plan brought back the bounce to Her gait,
> returned the color to Her cheeks. She shut down the operations in Hell,
> fired the Devil, and brought every last human to be by Her side in
> Heaven. Newcomers or old-timers, nefarious or righteous: under the new
> system, everyone gets equal time to speak with Her. Most people find Her
> a little garrulous and oversolicitous, but She cannot be accused of not
> caring.
>
> The most important aspect of Her new system is that everyone is treated
> equally. There is no longer fire for some and harp music for others.
> The afterlife is no longer defined by cots versus waterbeds, raw
> potatoes versus sushi, hot water versus champagne. Everyone is a
> brother to all, and for the first time an idea has been realized that
> never came to fruition on Earth: true equality.
>
> 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. The meritocrats are abashed that
> they're stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch
> of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the
> liberals have no downtrodden to promote.
>
> So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only
> thing everyone can agree upon is that they're all in Hell.
>
>
>
> Circle of Friends
>
> When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but
> everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your
> teeth. You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There is
> less traffic than normal. The rest of your building seems less full, as
> though it's a holiday. But everyone in your office is here, and they
> greet you kindly. You feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is
> someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you that this is the
> afterlife: the world is only made up of people you've met before.
>
> It's a small fraction of the world populationabout 0.00002
> percentbut it seems like plenty to you.
>
> It turns out that only the people you remember are here. So the woman
> with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be
> included. Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the class.
> Your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the
> years. All your old lovers. Your boss, your grandmothers, and the
> waitress who served your food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those
> you almost dated, those you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to
> spend quality time with your one thousand connections, to renew fading
> ties, to catch up with those you let slip away.
>
> It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn.
> You wonder what's different as you saunter through the vast quiet
> parks with a friend or two. No strangers grace the empty park benches.
> No family unknown to you throws bread crumbs for the ducks and makes
> you smile because of their laughter.
>
> As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no buildings
> teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals running
> 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the
> night with sardined passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners.
> You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You've never
> known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire. And now
> those factories stand empty. You've never known how to fashion a
> silicon chip from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the
> atmosphere, how to pit olives or lay railroad tracks. And now those
> industries are shut down.
>
> 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.
>
>
> Descent of Species
>
> In the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can
> choose whatever you would like to be in the next life. Would you like to
> be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with
> bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles?
>
> But perhaps you've just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you
> were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities
> that surrounded you, and now there's only one thing you yearn for:
> simplicity. That's permissible. So for the next round, you choose to
> be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of
> grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the
> prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow-flicking tail or the
> steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow-blanketed
> plains.
>
> You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved,
> and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse. Your muscles start
> to bulge; a mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable
> blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck
> immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow
> in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips
> strengthen, and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape,
> your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your
> cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect,
> synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your
> dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you
> from the distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip
> away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way
> of thinking begins to drift away from you.
>
> Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you
> overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the
> original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what
> it was like to be a horse.
>
> This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the
> punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment,
> crouching half-horse halfman, with the knowledge that you cannot
> appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you
> cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
> And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the
> next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't
> have the capacity to ask to become a human again. 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.
>
