A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife

by Daniel Quinn

  The third argument against the possibility of motion through a space made up of points is that, on this hypothesis, an arrow in any given moment of its flight must be at rest in some particular point.

  Crude, yes, but as Wittgenstein wrote (in a somewhat different context), “A point in space is a place for an argument.”2

  Our purpose, however, is not to argue with the learned scholars of the past or to discuss the abyss Zeno of Elea opened in the landscape of common sense. We simply want to alert you to the seemingly fantastic scene you will no doubt soon encounter, in order that you won’t question your so-called sanity or think you are hallucinating or dreaming.

  Perhaps you will turn a corner and see at the end of the street, where the landscape opens out to a flat terrain, a crowd gathering to no purpose you can understand, so you approach to investigate. Or perhaps you will have seen, pasted to a wall or pole or lean-to, an advertisement for a race, rather THE RACE:

  Regardless of how you come upon the scene, you will find always a young man or woman, trim, athletic, in running shorts and shoes, and beside her (let’s say the runner is female this time) will be a tortoise, shelled and sleepy. “On your mark,” you will hear the starter say, “get set, GO!” and off they’ll go … or will they?

  What is it you are seeing? Is this a race or a painting? A dream? A film?

  The runner is fleet, she moves swiftly across the landscape. The tortoise is slow, barely moving from one point to the next. But …the runner never appears to pass the tortoise. Dust puffs up behind the runner’s feet, she churns out the yards; the tortoise bobs its slow head toward the ground, lifts its right foreleg, sets it down, lifts its left back leg, sets it down, lifts its left foreleg, sets it down, lifts etc., but so slowly does the tortoise move, just watching it makes you yawn.

  So you look back at the runner, who is desperately trying to catch up to the tortoise. She races on, but a vast distance separates her from the finish line. And yet she covers the ground enviously fast.

  You don’t understand. What is going on here? Some in the crowd ooh and aah, others take notes, still others are photographing the event.

  Eventually, the runner tires, gives up, bewildered. The tortoise, who also has yet to achieve the finish line, appears bemused, then strolls off the track.

  The crowd disperses.

  You look around for an explanation, but none is forthcoming.

  This scene and its variations (a hare may be substituted for the runner, or you may encounter an archer and the target his speeding arrow can never reach) you are sure to come upon again and again in the Afterlife.

  • • •

  The following theoretical note was delivered at a conference in 1989 by Rotnac and Rekcur and is presented here as one of the numerous attempts to comprehend the physics of the Afterlife.

  ANTIMATTER

  As conceived by Zöllner, Sarfatti, Feynman, et al., the argument goes like this: Every (generic) particle has, as we know, its counterpart, a corresponding antiparticle. For the negatively charged electron, for example, it’s the positron. For the charmed quark, it’s the charmed antiquark.3 Posit then, if you will, a universe that mirrors this universe, a universe where matter is reversed, an antiuniverse. But just as a mirror is not an exact duplication of what it reflects (three dimensions become two, left becomes right, etc.), the antiuniverse is not an exact replication of the (positive) universe.

  Do you see where we’re going with this? Yes, it is possible the Afterlife, these theorists believe, is a “mirror image” of the (previous) universe, that the Afterlife is an antiuniverse.

  Now, let’s take it a step further. Consider again the antielectron, the positron. On earth, the positrons created in particle accelerators have a brief shelf life because inevitably they will come into contact with an electron that will annihilate them. We also know that every time a positron is created, so is an electron, but there are many more detectable electrons on earth than there are detectable positrons. Is it that at “pair production” (the formation of the positron A instigating electron B, which has its own travel line), before the positron meets its counterpart (electron C) and they mutually annihilate one another, the “trace” electron (A) does not in its turn generate (dialectically, if you will) a partner positron? Or is it that there exists somewhere in “space” or “hyperspace” a region where positrons dominate? And is this region then not the Afterlife?

  If the answer is yes, then this theory goes a long way in explaining much of the phenomena we encounter here and even the concepts of death and afterdeath. Consider: our terrestrial bodies contained a wealth of electrons, but only a few positrons. At death, in a manner analogous to pair production, this was reversed and we were shuttled along the travel lines of these positrons to where we are now. It’s possible to conceive the stages of crossing over as that journey of the body trace along the travel line of the positrons before they contact the travel line of the oncoming electrons and the two sets annihilate themselves, leaving behind a trace of a trace, i.e., us, and the ensuing radiation, i.e., the medium of the Afterlife.4

  In Feynman’s original (i.e., terrestrial) configuration, the particles were one particle, with the two electrons (C and B) moving forward in time and the positron (A) moving backward. If this were true, then we who inhabit the positronic Afterlife should also be moving backward. But, as you know, we don’t. We are not “antimen abiding antlike in an antiland” (in Alfau’s adept phrasing), but that which we are, inhabitants of the Afterlife, i.e., the dead.

  Rudolf v. B. Rucker (Infinity Can Be Yours) takes the concept of antimatter to its proper end when he says that not only is this “universe” one of antimatter where “antiatoms consisting of positrons orbit around an antinucleus of antineutrons and antiprotons, but that within that nucleus is a universe where antiantiatoms consisting of antipositrons orbit around an anti-antinucleus of antiantineutrons and antiantiprotons, and within that nucleus is a universe where antiantiantiatoms consisting of antiantipositrons orbit around an antiantiantinucleus of anti-antiantineutrons and antiantiantiprotons, and within that nucleus is a universe where antiantiantiantiatoms consisting of antiantiantipositrons orbit around an antiantiantiantinucleus of antiantiantiantineutrons and antiantiantiantiprotons, und so weiter.”

  1 See, however, attempts by Silas Haslam, The Hare of the Tortoise; Ezra Buckley, A Rift in the Feathers; Herbert Ashe, The Abyss That Embraces; Jacques Reboul, The Seeker Sought; Letizia Alvarez de Toledo, Racing Alice; Rudolf v. B. Rucker, Infinity Is Mine; et al.

  2 For a further elucidation of Zeno’s paradoxes, see J. L. Borges’s chapter on the Tortoise in his Biography of the Infinite.

  3 It might be apposite here to recall that the mating of a charmed quark with a charmed antiquark would not outwardly display charm because the antiquark would cancel the charm of the quark.

  4 One problem with this notion is that no one has detected any radiation in the Afterlife.

  FURTHER (AND HIGHLY

  RECOMMENDED)

  READING

  Earthly bibliographers can be relied on to answer at least three questions about every work they list: Who published it, where, and when? In the Afterlife the first of these is never answered, because it’s taken for granted that the author published it, the second is never answered because the best one can do with anyone’s location in the Afterlife is to describe it in vague and relative terms, and the third is seldom answered—beyond perhaps noting a decade or a century—because few books are dated (it’s considered a bit pretentious).

  GENERAL WORKS OF GUIDANCE

  New arrivals in the Afterlife want immediate answers to all their questions, which vary little from individual to individual: Where am I? What is my body made of? What’s going to happen to me? What is the nature of the beings I see around me? How can I find my friends and relatives? And so on. It is the function of The Little Book to provide these answers. I have been asked: Since conditions in the Afterlife are invariable, why do you put out
a new edition of The Little Book every few years? The answer is twofold. First, while the Afterlife is invariable, the experience that people have of it is not; a few hundred years ago, people expected to see Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory in the Afterlife—and they generally did (much to their initial confusion). Obviously if The Little Book had been in print in the fifteenth century, it would have been vastly different from the present volume. Readers of each generation are reassured when they see contemporary references and language in The Little Book; it makes them feel they’re getting “the true gen.” Second, the preparation of successive editions of The Little Book is my occupation; it is, as we say, “what keeps me alive.”

  Since publishing is not pursued for monetary gain in the Afterlife, similar books are seldom written for the same “market.” Thus The Little Book has no competitors and is without doubt the most widely read book in the Afterlife. It is, in fact, the only book that is “issued” by the habitat itself. As explained in Chapter Four, people generally receive a copy by one means or another within minutes of arrival, when their distress is registered by their surrounding environment. It circulates in English and all other Indo-European languages. Modified versions appear in most Afro-Asiatic (or Hamito-Semitic) tongues. No similar publications exist in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, or Oceania, the information needs of arrivals from these areas being met in a multitude of other ways, such as the “thought pellets” of China, the “waves of knowing” of Oceania, and the enchanting “Three Mooncrane Song” of Japan.

  Once immediate anxieties have been laid to rest, newcomers begin to cast about for a direction for the future and naturally seek guidance from books. A perennial favorite for several decades has been So Now You’re Dead! by the prolific Scots writer Margaret Oliphant (1828–97); this is a lighthearted but level-headed look at “starting over” in the Afterlife, with particular attention given to breaking unfruitful behavior patterns acquired in life.

  Take My Advice, edited by John Bartlett (compiler of the famed Familiar Quotations), assembles useful accounts of “getting started again” by the likes of Gustav Mahler, Charles Lewis Tiffany, David Belasco, Clarence Darrow, and Calvin Coolidge; as this list suggests, the book could use a bit of updating, but its contents have inspired millions and will continue to do so for generations to come.

  Diogenes’ Bowl,1 by an unknown author, dates from the seventeenth century but has never been surpassed as a guide to what can be accomplished by self-discipline and self-organization in the Afterlife beginning (as we all do) with empty hands.

  THE AFTERLIFE IN GENERAL

  What We Know and Don’t Know About the Afterlife, by Isaac Asimov (in life, I’m told, “a distinguished and prolific science writer”) is one of the most remarkable and readable volumes ever produced on the subject—and is made all the more remarkable by the fact that the author, as of this writing, has been in our midst for not much more than a year. A banquet for the intellectually curious, this book is precisely the inventory promised in the title.

  Mechanisms of the Afterlife, by Georg von Hertling (1843–1919), a German statesman and philosopher, is, as its title suggests, a review of the way things work in the Afterlife, from the stages of decay of a Husk to the replenishment of goods in a store, including many obscure and seldom-noticed processes. A trifle heavy-handed in the Teutonic manner but well observed and admirably detailed.

  Butterflies in the Afterlife, by Lillian Nordica (1859–1914), the American soprano once noted for her Marguerite in Faust, compiled this dubious catalogue of 1001 Afterlife lepidoptera, amongst which one finds the Singing Butterfly (Sopranus plexippus), the Donkey Butterfly (Asinus rapae), and an assortment of other fantastical insects. When questioned about their authenticity, Ms. Nordica has stated variously that she studied entomology at Harvard “with the best of them,” that she has specimens of each butterfly catalogued and will show them to you if you can tell her how to get to the “other side of the other side,” and, more cryptically, that “the butterfly forgot to wake up.”

  Louise Davis (1924–76), a fifth grade teacher for twenty years in Lake Charles, Louisiana, who, during her life, claimed to have been visited by her dead father and several aunts, wrote over eight hundred letters (these letters are on file at the Central Registry, but have little historical or aesthetic value) to these relatives once she crossed over, but received not a single reply. Her What Death Is Not, a remarkable tour de force, at times brilliant, at other times stunningly dull,2 consists entirely of sentences in the negative: “Death is not the self shining through the body like a flashlight through a window. Death is not the super-physical self robed in a glorious vesture of amethyst, ammonia, and gold. Death is not a song. Death is not the cold blue silence of interstellar space. Death is not the full weight of the downward condition of unliberation and the propensities for standing too long before the wheel of ignorance. Death is not a slow boat to China. Death is not an empty glove. [Et cetera.]” A public reading from the work, mistaken for a pious exercise, is said to have been the founding inspiration for the religion of the Nay-Sayers.

  Newcomers startled by their first encounter with a phantasm are further startled to learn that almost nothing has been published on the subject. Writing a book about phantasms is rather like writing a book about large cakes or strangely shaped toes. Why would one bother? Nonetheless, if you are avid for such reading, look for Phantasms I Have Known, by Arthur Godfrey (1903–83), a popular American entertainer of the 1950s. He chronicles his encounters with “the web-footed house,” “the grizzled gray tree roo who wore a hat,” “the formless hand,” “the frog prince,” “the sunbonnet of Lucerne,” “the cordless telephone,” “the ukelele mountain,” “the glypdodon who loved a mouse,” “the upright donkey,” “the fur-lined Edsel,” and other equally innocuous and boring emanations. Evidently Mr. Godfrey thought this work would be a great hit in the Afterlife, and copies exist in abundance.

  Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), the Russian-American scientist and author of Lolita, Pale Fire, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Gift, was, in life, deeply interested in the Afterlife and the means by which one could cross over. (The main thrust of his approach to crossing over was, I’m told, a potent blend of aesthetics and ethics.) To date, Mr. Nabokov has written only a single work, The Mysterious Mental Maneuver, which the jacket claims is the definitive Afterlife text regarding the next stage of our passage. The “text” itself, you discover when you open the book, consists of a seemingly infinite number of exceptionally thin, transparent pages. Unlike Mr. Godfrey’s volume, examples of Maneuver are exceedingly hard to come by.

  TRAVEL AND BIOGRAPHY

  The Search for Homer’s Shade, by archaeologist-adventurer Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), discoverer of the site of Troy, the city celebrated in Homer’s Iliad, is a classic of epic proportions, encompassing a fascinating sixty-year “journey of detection” in twenty-seven weighty volumes. Complete sets are hard to find; ask round for a Schliemann club. In 1953 Schliemann announced that he was setting out to find the shade of Noah; his present whereabouts are unknown.

  Who’s Where in the Underworld? has no counterpart in any earthly publishing venture. Volumes (which may be massive tomes or slender pamphlets) are not organized alphabetically, temporally, or geographically, and may be added to the series by anyone at any time. If you have a burning desire to interview the Roman emperor Nero, consult volume XXVI, which will give you directions that worked for someone writing in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, there is no central publisher in charge of numbering the volumes, so there are at least six volumes numbered XXVI; all the same, one of those six will tell you where Nero was to be found a century and a half ago. Who knows? He may still be there.

  Travels Through the Afterlife, by William Habington (1605–54), the poet who memorialized his wife, Lucy, in a cycle of love poems on the theme of chastity and author of the play The Queene of Arragon, is one of the most curious volumes in the A
fterlife, consisting primarily of the phrase “weeping like a pretty Japanese girl” maddeningly repeated throughout the book’s 598 pages, as in the following from page 452: “In order not to weep like a pretty Japanese girl, I travelled in early September to the Bavarian Alps where I saw many beautiful cows, none of them weeping like a pretty Japanese girl, then I returned to the road and, in order not to weep like a pretty Japanese girl, travelled to Berlin, where I stayed for four days and visited the British Book Shop where the clerks were drinking PG Tips but also where no one was weeping like a pretty Japanese girl, then to the Berlin Zoo where it was raining hard enough to make one weep like a pretty Japanese girl, and then to Innsbruck where I took walks through the mountains, none of which were weeping like a pretty Japanese girl, then caught a bad cold, felt very much like weeping like a pretty Japanese girl or leaping out the window, then dreamed I saw Lucy dressed in a kimono, which pleased me almost enough to weep like a pretty Japanese girl, but alas it was only a dream, so I walked down the road until I came to the city of Zurich where I was sure to see, or so I thought, pretty girls or women of French, German, Italian, and, who knows, perhaps even Japanese descent, but there I saw no one, so that I wanted to weep like a pretty Japanese girl but composed myself and stumbled on toward the approaching ash cloud …” Never once in the travelogue does Habington encounter a young or old woman or even a child of Oriental descent.

  The Seven, by Lucy Terry (1730–1821), the first African-American poet, is the record of her search for the six men and one woman ambushed in a Vermont meadow by Indians on August 25, 1746, whom she wrote about in her poem “Bars Fight.” Ms. Terry’s interviews with the participants in the battle, none of whom knew they had been immortalized in verse, is a fascinating record of the problems colonial Americans had adjusting to the habitat. The only member of the Seven she has yet to locate is Eunice Allen (“And had not her petticoats stopped her, / The awful creatures had not catched her, / Nor tommy hawked her on the head, / And left her on the ground for dead”), but Ms. Terry confidently states, “She’s here somewhere, I know it, and I’ll find her if it’s the last thing I do.”