Sum Forty Tales From The Afterlives Quotes

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.

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 only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.

...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

When we're in a human body, we don't care about universal collapse - instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.

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.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

I came here for the same reason doctors wear uniforms of long white coats...They don't do it for their benefit, but for yours.

And in this form, they find themselves longing to ascend mountains, wander the seas, and conquer the air, seeking to recapture the limitlessness they once knew.

And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher stalk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.

When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels. After some questioning, you find out that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in his mighty hands, alternately reading the book and staring reflectively at the night sky.

So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you’ve left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. 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.

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.

But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you’re not gone, you’re simply taking on different forms.

Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

But, instead, we all watch for one thing: evidence of our residual influence in the world,

Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end - they simply move on to a different dimension.

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 half-man, 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.

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.

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.

You were all these ages, they concede, and you were none.

Of all the Programmers' planets, ours is the supercomputing golden child, the world that inexplicably provides enough power to light up the galaxy.

They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth. They conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the afterlife. You were all these ages, and you were none.

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.

And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Ve Tanrı tüm yaratılışın kaçınılmaz biçimde şöyle sonlandığını düşünerek avunur: Aciz kalan Yaratıcılar, kendi elleriyle yarattıklarından köşe bucak kaçarlar.

Cesur olanlar büyük çehreye değil, onun yokluğuna dayanabilenlerdir.

we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

God realized that He had no concept of the skills required to run an organization of this magnitude.

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.

Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don't we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth? One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You're slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility.

When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves

……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 population — about 0.00002 percent — but it seems like plenty to you…[…] 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.

To understand the meaning of this afterlife, you must remember that everyone is multifaceted. And since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives—often surprising to you—helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you’ve left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. 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.

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.

As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are—which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst. Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work. After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into lower-dimensional creatures. We project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse—instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair. Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.

Kendisini küçük ölçekli parçalar üzerinden yaratan her şey, aynı parçalar tarafından tüketilir.

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.

At some, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of people you've met before. .. 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 what you precisely chose when you were alive.

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. So you wait in this lobby until the third death. There are long tables with coffee, tea, and cookies; you can help yourself.

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?

Not everyone is sad when the Callers enter the room and shout out the next list of names. On the contrary, some people beg and plead, prostrating themselves at the Callers’ feet. These are generally the folks who have been here a long time, too long, especially those who are remembered for unfair reasons. For example, take the farmer over there, who drowned in a small river two hundred years ago. Now his farm is the site of a small college, and the tour guides each week tell his story. So he’s stuck and he’s miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He is utterly alienated from his name; it is no longer identical with him but continues to bind. The cheerless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart were complicated. The gray-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall.

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.

Even with the aid of our modern deductive skills, it is impossible to imagine our own death. It is not because we lack insight, but because the concept of death is made up. There is no such thing. This will become clear to you at some point, when you get into a situation that you think should kill you—say, a severe car crash. You’ll be surprised to realize that it didn’t hurt. The witnesses around you will laugh and help you up and brush off the glass and explain the situation. The situation is that the people around you are Actors. Your interactions with other people were almost entirely scripted from their point of view. Your “afterlife,” if you want to call it that, is your initiation to the game.

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 mean-spirited in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who to Hell?

You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse.

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.

So you wait in this lobby until the third death. There are long tables with coffee, tea, and cookies; you can help yourself. There are people here from all around the world, and with a little effort you can strike up convivial small talk. Just be aware that your conversation may be interrupted at any moment by the Callers, who broadcast your new friend’s name to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the Earth. Your friend slumps, face like a shattered and reglued plate, saddened even though the Callers tell him kindly that he’s off to a better place. No one knows where that better place is or what it offers, because no one exiting through that door has returned to tell us. Tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering. We all wag our heads at that typical timing.

So you memorize your brief script, and when you walk back through the door you will be wherever you are next needed: the restaurant bathroom, or the museum gift shop where your friend is waiting to meet you, or perhaps a bustling sidewalk where you are to be spotted arm in arm with another Actor. For the Beneficiaries, the back sides of all doors are constructed just before they enter; for the Actors, all the doors of the world are our portal into and out of this waiting room. We don’t know how the Directors dynamically construct the world, much less for what purpose. We are only told that our obligation here as Actors will eventually end, and then we will move on to a better place. You may decide you’re not willing to uphold this continuous lie to the Beneficiaries. You may yell into the Directors’ intercom that you won’t be their deceitful stool pigeon. This is a typical reaction. But very quickly you will relent and play your part earnestly. We don’t know much about the Directors, only that they are clever enough to get us to do something we don’t want to do.

Dividing the population into two categories—good and bad—seemed 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 automation—and 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.

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.

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.

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

Ölüm sonrası yaşamda başka insanlara göre değil, kendinize göre yargılanırsınız. Daha açıkçası "ne olabilirdiniz"e göre yargılanırsınız. Dolayısıyla ölüm sonrasında yaşam, şimdiki hayata oldukça benzer ama artık o hayata olabileceğiniz tüm "siz"ler de dahildir. Örneğin, asansörde kendinizin daha başarılı versiyonlarına, belki de doğduğunuz yerden üç yıl önce ayrılan kendinize rastlayabilirsiniz. Ya da uçakta bir şirket başkanının yanına oturmuş ve o kişi tarafından işe alınmış bir versiyonunuz çıkabilir karşınıza. Bu "siz"lerle karşılaştıkça, başarılı olmuş bir kuzeniniz için duyacağınız türden bir gurur duyarsınız: başarılar doğrudan size ait olmasa da, bir şekilde size yakın gelir. Ancak çok geçmeden gözünüz korkmaya başlar. Bu "siz"ler gerçek siz değildir, sizden daha iyidirler. Daha akıllı seçimler yapmış, daha çok çalışmış, kapalı kapıları zorlama yolunda fazladan çaba sarf etmişlerdir. Söz konusu kapılar nihayetinde kırılarak açılmış, yaşamlarının renkli ve yepyeni yönlere doğru dağılmasını sağlamıştır. Bu tür bir başarı, genler açısından size daha iyi bir el düşmesiyle açıklanamaz, üstün versiyonlarınız sadece elinizdeki kağıtları daha iyi oynamıştır. Paralel yaşamlarında daha iyi kararlar vermiş, ahlaki hatalardan kaçınmış, aşktan ümitlerini kolay kolay kesmemişlerdir. Hatalarını düzeltmek için sizden çok çalışmış, daha fazla özür dilemişlerdir. Sonunda bu daha iyi "siz"lerin yakınında duramaz olursunuz. Hayatınızda kimseye karşı böyle rekabetçi hislerle dolu olmadığınızı fark edersiniz. Kendinizden daha başarısız "siz"lerle kaynaşmaya çalışırsınız ama bu da acınızı dindirmez. Aslında daha az önemli "siz"lere karşı fazla sempati beslemezsiniz ve mikinlikleri karşısında biraz kibir duyarsınız. Zahmet edip de etkileşime girdiğinizde, "Televizyon seyretmeyi bırakıp kanepeden kalksaydın, bu durumda olmazdın," dersiniz onlara. Halbuki daha iyi "siz"ler ahirette daima karşınızdadır. Kitapçıda onları elinizden kaçırdığınız sevgi dolu kadınla kol kola görürsünüz. Bir diğer "siz", kitap raflarınız tarıyor, sizin aksinize yazmayı tamamlayabildiği kitabın üstünde parmağını gezdiriyordur. Ya dışarıda koşan şu "siz"e ne demeli? Sizin bir türlü düzenli gidemediğiniz spor salonu sayesinde vücudu sizinkinden çok daha güzeldir. En sonunda savunmacı bir pozisyon alır, böylesine iyi huylu ve erdemli olmayı zaten istemediğinize dair nedenler aramaya başlarsınız. Nispet olsun diye daha kötü sizleri dost edinir, onlarla içmeye gidersiniz. Ancak barda bile, yaptığı en son iyi tercihi kutlamak için dostlarına içki ısmarlayan daha iyi sizlere rastlarsınız. Böyle böyle cezanız ahirette zekice ve otomatik olarak yerini bulur: potansiyelinizi hayata geçirmekte ne kadar başarısız olursanız, karşınızda bu sinir bozucu "siz"lerden o kadar çok çıkacaktır.

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.

When soldiers part ways at war’s end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person—it is the final bloodless death of the war.

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.