Nick and I sat and watched movie trailers for hours, complaining about the buffering speed and talking like two people who have been reading the same things for a decade: “Have you heard about how in his fading years, Phillip K. Dick bought a year’s pass to Disneyland? He’d go to that little outdoor cafe on Main Street and just sit there. He loved Disneyland–his favorite place on earth. He was confident that he’d be accompanied by Walt’s spirit some day.”
“No, but it doesn’t surprise me. At the end of his life he couldn’t differentiate between fantasy and reality, you know? The FBI essentially had to tell him to stop calling them, because he was so paranoid that there was some neo-Nazi plot to start World War III and he kept trying to contact them.”
This kind of conversation is my favorite way to pass the time. It requires very little immediate context, trusts that the participants share a broad pool of knowledge, and often carries the slight tang of nostalgia. Nick and I had likely both encountered those PKD snippets before, somewhere on the Internet, but it’s still fun to hear them recalled aloud, crafted and embellished differently each time.
There’s a coffee shop I visit solely for this kind of talk–never political or pedagogical, just anecdotal. There, a mustachioed stonemason showed me his photo of a Darth Vader grotesque on Washington National Cathedral. I told the stonemason, in turn, about Cary Grant’s affinity for LSD, how the actor had sworn by its use in psychotherapy. This kind of conversation is mirrored in the proliferation of shared RSS feeds. It’s our job to know a little bit about everything. Two weeks ago, this info-gluttony was mercilessly parodied on IFC’s Portlandia, where two characters engage in rapid-fire literary one-upmanship: “Did you read that thing in…”
Nick studied Classics in college, and he swears that this desire to collect apocryphal narrative gobbets is the reason people study Latin and Greek in the first place. “Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head,” for instance. It also seems to me the reason to love movie trailers. In a way, it’s better than actually watching movies: it’s enough to know that there is a horror movie coming out in which the antagonist is a man-killing tire.
As I made to leave from Nick’s house, he stopped me. “Hold on, I’ve got two books for you. I’ve got to inscribe them. Is that silly? That I feel the need to write in all of the books that I lend out?”
“No, it’s sweet, I think. I’ve got most of them memorized.”
One of the books was David Eagleman‘s Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives. I had already heard of it–a segment had been featured on This American Life [another great provider of “have you heard about…” conversation].
Eagleman’s book has been praised plenty since 2009, but often with an odd angle. The book’s marketing and press has made much of Eagleman’s career as a neuroscientist. The bio cutely snaps, after detailing his serious and impressive work studying synesthesia: “At night he writes fiction.”
Perhaps Eagleman’s profession is just another “have you heard…” story, but it seems like the necessary disclaimer for any creative work done by a scientist or vice versa. When mashup artist Girl Talk started coming to prominence, kids in gig lines would often throw around the detail that his [Greg Gillis’s] day job was in biomedical engineering. One of last week’s most e-mailed New York Times articles concerns Vladimir Nabokov‘s eventual vindication as a lepidopterist. Apparently, there exists some kind of remarkable chasm between science and fiction because we always feign shock upon coming upon a scientist who composes like a writer or a writer who thinks like a scientist.
Sum‘s tidy conceit, of forty super-short visions of the afterlife, could very well come off as wide-eyed speculations more suited for acid trips than publication [What if our universe is actually just a tiny part of a much bigger universe, man?] if not handled so deftly and with such restraint. Eagleman writes like a sage, a humanist in the tradition of Antoine de Saint Exupery or Tom Stoppard. He uses considerable imagination to express thornier truths about faith, desire, and time through elegant, simple allegories. What if bureaucratic committees ran the afterlife? What if reincarnation was a kind of eternal, forever-downgrading trick? What if we survived in the form of self-perpetuating technological social networks?
The book is a short one, just barely edging over a hundred pages, and I tore through it greedily, scarfing down each hypothetical and pestering my girlfriend with impromptu readings: “Listen to this one!”
Sum‘s closest cousin is Italo Calvino‘s Invisible Cities. As with Invisible Cities, Sum‘s stories start to bleed together near the end, grouped into a rough thematic progression. Where Calvino’s work is obsessed with semiotics and memory, Eagleman’s pet concerns are scales: both in terms of balance and in terms of size. Eagleman is never clearly an atheist or a theist. He is sometimes an optimist and sometimes a cynic. Sum is more concerned about provoking thought than arguing for any particular vision of the universe.
However, one constant is the idea of repercussions. In many of the visions of the afterlife, Eagleman brings unforeseen consequences to bear upon his own hypotheticals. When God decides to let everyone into Heaven, for instance, the results are disastrous:
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.
As such, the stories strive toward balancing their equations: hubris is punished, perspective is gained, or a riddle comes full circle. We are allowed to examine a universe relatively fully, following a speculative conceit to its logical end.
Sum is like forty movie trailers for forty well-conceived science fiction tales, or like forty good “Have you heard…” stories that you might amass at a community coffee shop. You don’t have to bother with reading a full-length novel, because you already know all the best parts.
