Sum

This book has been making me think like I’m Winnie the Pooh. I sit on my bed like its a log and tap my forehead like its full of stuffing.

Here’s some honey for your head: what do you think happens when you die? My friend once told me he envisions an endless waltz, where you dance casually with all the people you’ve ever known, talking and being happy.

Well Mr. Eagleman has forty  cynical, depressing, or upsetting scenes waiting for you, and all of them are good. Divided up into bite-sized 3-page chunks, you can eat the whole cake in a day or read one each night before you go to bed and drift off to sleep wondering if you’ll wake up in some paranoid kind of hell.

This is the kind of thing we need to be teaching in school. Think about it. There is no real cultural dialouge about the afterlife even though everyone has an opinion. And in my opinion, each idea is just as likely and crazy and the next.

Maybe we’re all characters in someone elses dream, maybe I’m dreaming all of this right now, maybe we’ll get to heaven and God is a depressed middle aged woman. Or maybe heaven is just the punchline is some  great cosmic joke.

March 11, 2009. Tags: afterlife, david, death, eagleman, forty, sum. Uncategorized.