Praise for
A Newcomer’s Guide to the Afterlife
“Startlingly original and eminently practical … Assuming that the imaginations of Whalen and Quinn are as accurate as they are rich, the afterlife will be a curious place—vast and unpredictable, at times frustrating, and often hilarious.”
—The New Orleans Times-Picayune
PRAISE FOR DANIEL QUINN
My Ishmael
“Enthralling, shocking, hope-filled, and utterly fearless … Quinn strikes out in entirely new territory, posing questions that will rock you on your heels, and providing tantalizing possibilities for a truly new world vision.”
—Susan Chernak McElroy, Animals as Teachers & Healers
The Story of B
“One of the most important storytellers of our age, Daniel Quinn, in The Story of B, continues the journey begun so beautifully with Ishmael. Whether or not you agree with every word, there is no doubt that ‘B’ offers us a unique opportunity—to think together about the unquestioned beliefs and assumptions that have shaped our culture over the past 10,000 years and that will, if they remain unquestioned, keep us on a path that seems increasingly unsustainable.”
—Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline
Ishmael
“From now on I will divide the books I have read into two categories—the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after.”
—Jim Britell, Whole Earth Review
PRAISE FOR TOM WHALEN
“Whalen’s work is thickly lyrical and meditative, interrogating the relation of language to things, of books to life.”
—Review of Contemporary Fiction
This edition contains the complete text
of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
A NEWCOMER’S GUIDE TO THE AFTERLIFE
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published August 1997
Bantam trade paperback edition / November 1998
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1997 by Daniel Quinn and Tom Whalen.
PHOTO COLLAGES BY GREG BOYD.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-24558
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books
eISBN: 978-0-307-42869-1
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One: Basic Questions Answered
Chapter Two: A Few Dos and Don’ts of the Afterlife
Chapter Three: Neighbors in the Afterlife
Chapter Four: The Afterlife As a Habitat
Chapter Five: Religions of the Afterlife
Chapter the Last: In Which Lies Are Exposed!
Appendixes (Introduction)
Appendix I: Two Crossing-Over Tracts
Appendix II: Two Spontaneous Religions
Appendix III: Two Theoretical Concerns
Further (and Highly Recommended) Reading
Glossary
Other Books by These Authors
About the Authors
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1 The Mother of Clouds and the Father of Cities
1.2 Gala at the La Brea Memorial Wild Animal Monument
1.3 “Wedding Procession at the Village Hall”
3.1 The Society of Fools at “The Acropolis”
4.1 René Magritte at Work in the Afterlife
4.2 Wooden Dog Phantasm at the Crystal Tongue Gate
5.1 Schismatics of the Church of the Afterlife As Will and Idea
appII.1 A Meeting of the Church of Constant Crisis
bm1.1 Bedlam: A Quiet Moment at Dusk
bm2.1 The Road at the Valley of Stelae
INTRODUCTION
I have to begin this introduction with a confession: that it was originally my intention to offer a lie to explain how this book came into being.
I planned to offer this lie in an introduction supposedly written by the publishers (whoever they might prove to be), explaining that the manuscript for the book had come to them from an unknown, unagented author we’ll call Jones. In his cover letter, Jones explained that, as a result of an accident that had occurred some months before, he had spent six minutes clinically dead. During this Near-Death Experience (NDE), Jones wandered in a muddled state through an unfamiliar urban landscape until he stopped a stranger and asked where he was. This stranger, recognizing the cause of Jones’s bewilderment, handed him a small book, saying that Jones was welcome to keep it. Jones replied that it wouldn’t be necessary for him to keep it because he had an eidetic memory; by merely glancing at the pages, he would be able to carry away the entire book, every last jot and tittle of it, unread, in his memory. He quickly paged through the book, returned it to its owner, and moments later was restored to life in a hospital emergency room. Several months passed before Jones remembered that he had the text of an unknown book lying in his head; “reading” it in memory, he realized that he had brought back from his NDE nothing less than a guidebook written for new arrivals to the Afterlife, which he duly transcribed for earthly publication.
It was, I thought, a clever invention—and perhaps not strictly speaking a lie at all, since I didn’t actually expect or intend anyone to be deceived by it.
And now for the truth, which, as usual, is not nearly as tidy as the invention.
I’d been working for almost a year on Providence, an autobiographical work tracing the origins of Ishmael, the book for which I am best known. It was being written in the form of a dialogue between myself and a stranger, who, according to the framing story of the book, invades my house one night and demands answers to certain questions. Then one night a few months ago, I had a dream that was almost identical to this framing story. Trudging half-asleep (in my dream) from bathroom to bedroom in the middle of the night, I was startled to see someone sitting on a sofa in the living room—startled but not frightened, because this was plainly not a burglar or a mad slasher come to do us in. Drawing nearer and turning up the lights, I saw, in fact, that it was not a stranger at all, though it was certainly a strange person to find visiting my house in the middle of the night. It was Delores Elaine Pierce, head of the post office where I maintained a box for mail from readers of Ishmael. This was in fact a U.S. Post Office Contract Station, rather than a fully fledged post office, and the whole operation could probably have fit into my living room without squeezing. In terms of personnel, Delores was it; she sorted the mail, filled the boxes, and manned the window. She was an attractive, cheerful, and personable woman in her forties, and we were on a first-name basis almost from the first day of our acquaintance.
So as to be able to include the number of the postal box in my book, I’d had to rent it nearly a year before the book actually came out, and by the ti
me the first piece of mail arrived, my wife and I had moved to the other side of the city. I explained the situation to Delores, who said it would be no trouble for her to forward the mail to our new location. However, it soon became obvious to me that it was trouble, and I told her to let the mail accumulate and I’d collect it every Saturday. As well as letters, a number of interesting parcels arrived, including, among other things, a framed, life-size photographic portrait of a gorilla, and I saw no reason not to let Delores know what was going on. In fact, I gave her a copy of the book so she could see for herself how the box was being used. She enjoyed this contact with “a famous author” and confided that she too harbored an ambition to “write a book someday.”
We became quite friendly, and I missed her whenever she took a vacation and a stranger appeared in her place at the window.
Then, as I say, one night she appeared in my living room, in a dream. I told her how surprised I was to see her there.
“I have some mail for you,” she said, handing me a bulky envelope.
“You shouldn’t have bothered,” I told her. “I’ll be by on Saturday, as usual.”
“I know, but I thought this might be urgent.”
The envelope contained a small, perfectly blank paperbound book about four inches by five and three-quarters of an inch thick. I frowned in puzzlement, but Delores seemed very impressed by it. “Now that’s the book you should be working on,” she said. I pointed out that it wasn’t much of a book, since the pages were blank, but she had a good explanation for that: “The pages are blank because you haven’t filled them up yet.”
“What do you think I should fill them with?”
To my total astonishment, she said: “I think you should write a guidebook for the dead.”
I stared at her dumbfounded for a moment, then asked why on earth I should do that.
“Because, when people arrive in the Afterlife, they’re very confused at first. They don’t know where they are or what’s going on.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” I said, “but how do I come into it? I don’t know anything about the Afterlife.”
“I can help you with that part,” Delores replied. “You remember I once told you I wanted to write a book of my own?”
I said I did.
“Well, this is it.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “You want to write a guide to the Afterlife?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why do you need me? You can write it yourself.”
“Oh, you know what it’s like down at the station. I never have any time.”
“Well, it’s an intriguing idea,” I had to admit. “But if you don’t have time to write it yourself, I don’t see how you’re going to have time to help me write it.”
“You can keep that,” she said, nodding at the book.
I looked down and saw that the pages of the book were no longer blank; I had the impression that Delores had somehow “downloaded” her thoughts directly onto the paper. What I saw fascinated me, and Delores ceased to be the focal point of the dream. I spent the rest of the night reading in that nightmarish way of dreams, in which everything seems to make brilliant sense for a moment and then collapses into chaos and gibberish.
When I woke in the morning, I realized I had “dreamed up” a terrific idea for a book. An immediate difficulty came to mind: If this was supposed to be the guidebook that the dead receive on arrival in the Afterlife, how would it come to be published on earth? A little thought gave me an answer to that: If someone with an eidetic memory were to have an NDE lasting long enough for him to get a copy of the guidebook and scan it, then he would return to life with the complete text in his head and would only have to type it out to produce a publishable manuscript. For anyone who accepts the possibility of having an NDE, there’s nothing inherently incredible in this premise; after all, no experience of anything occurs unless there’s a memory of it, and if one is capable of having a memory of an NDE, then why not an eidetic memory of it?
While I had it in mind, I sat down and wrote the introduction described above. That done, I was ready to make a start on the book itself.
I found that my dream had left me with a number of surprisingly strong impressions, chief among them that of the Afterlife author who had created the guidebook (and whose voice I would be adopting in the text); he was a tad stuffy, a tad pedantic, and perhaps a tad more formal than modern readers are used to, though all this seemed suitable to a man who had spent his lifetime, as I imagined it, during the first half of the nineteenth century. I even had a name for this gentleman—James Catnach—who had evidently been producing the guidebook for a long time, since this was the forty-ninth edition. (Though the book is undated, internal evidence places it clearly in the 1990s.)
The “reading” I’d done in my dream hadn’t given me a text, but it had given me all the information I needed to produce a text, or so it seemed to me at the outset. I’d told Delores that I didn’t know anything about the Afterlife, but I now seemed to know everything. I felt prepared to answer any question a newcomer might ask and thought it would make good sense to open the book with a fairly lengthy Q & A section, “Basic Questions Answered.” This kept me happily busy for several days.
As I worked, however, I began to feel uneasy about certain “dark” portions of the book. I call them dark because I knew they were there—but only by the shadows they cast. I thought I knew why they were dark; they were texts imported from other sources, and I had the impression that they were very alien to Catnach’s reasonable tone and commonsense approach to conditions in the Afterlife. Catnach felt obliged to include these alien texts in his book (perhaps for the very reason that they were alien), but they represented irrational and unruly intrusions into the tidy presentation he wanted to make. Perhaps he didn’t really want to see them in his book at all, and for that reason I hadn’t been able to see them clearly myself. Although they troubled me, I decided to worry about them later. After all, I had plenty of other material to keep me busy—or so I imagined. In fact, one morning I powered up my word processor, brought up the text from the hard disk, and discovered I didn’t have a word to add to what was already there.
I was startled and puzzled. I’d had no hint that I was on the verge of running out of material, and in an odd way I knew I hadn’t run out of material. There are computer programs that can take an image and scramble it into what looks like a featureless array of dots and scrawls. To the straightforward glance, there is utterly nothing to be seen in this array, but if you can manage to gaze at it with an unfocused stare, your brain will obligingly unscramble the image, which will spring forth from the surface of the printed sheet with astonishing depth. For as long as you maintain this stare, you can move your eyes from place to place in the picture and discover details that seem almost uncanny in their clarity, but close one eye and the image vanishes instantly and completely. You know as a certainty that the image is there, but not a trace of it can be discovered without resuming that unfocused stare. It was that way with me and the material of Catnach’s book. I knew it was there, but I’d somehow lost the knack of accessing it.
Another person might have decided to relax and wait for the knack to return, but that’s not my way. I struggled and strove for the next two days without making any progress at all. The “Other Side” was blocked from sight … at least from waking sight.
On the second night, however, I visited the Afterlife in my dreams.
I knew where I was without being told, as one does in dreams. It was, as I’d already written, quite an ordinary sort of place—a desert, though it lacked all the negative qualities associated with earthly deserts. It wasn’t hot or bleak or sandy, it was just empty.
I was walking in a dry riverbed toward a revelation that would, I felt, solve all my problems. I was going to be shown something that would sweep away all my difficulties. In fact, I could see it already, on the horizon, or in the air just above the horizon, a kind of vortex of turbulence
with an undulant black thread at its center. As I approached it, I realized that the riverbed was not exactly empty; air and light and power were being powerfully drawn (as I was) toward the object hovering at the horizon.
Before long, the land in front of me fell away into an enormous valley hundreds of miles wide, and the riverbed plunged into it and then divided and subdivided countlessly to form a vast, exquisite delta reaching out into an ocean not of water but of seething energy, which flowed inexhaustibly upward into that vortex of turbulence, which now (from my vantage point) stood about forty-five degrees above the horizon.
At the center of the vortex, I knew as a certainty, swam Leviathan. This was the “black thread” I’d seen from a distance. Only in dreams can one witness such awesome events as the swimming of Leviathan. I stood, enchanted, as this gleaming beast poured gracefully and with infinite slowness through the turbulence of which it was the center. It was, I soon understood, the cause of the turbulence. More, the turbulence was the result of the flow of matter and energy into Leviathan from all sides—from the sky above, from the “ocean,” from the river, and even from the land, which I could see clearly being drawn upward like a tenuous mist. This was the “source”; this was the fountainhead of the Afterlife, perhaps of the cosmos itself. All matter and energy flowed up into Leviathan and were endlessly renewed within it. I watched, fascinated, enthralled, and would have been content to watch forever.…
You might expect I would have awakened the next morning disappointed that I hadn’t been “shown something that would sweep away all my difficulties,” but this wasn’t the case. I awoke knowing exactly what I needed. I needed a collaborator, and what’s more I knew who the collaborator should be: Tom Whalen of New Orleans, a writer I’d never met in person or even spoken to on the phone but whose work had a clear resonance with my own. (There was a time, later on, when I thought that my dream had “suggested” him to me: Leviathan = Whale = Whalen and Delta = Mississippi Delta = New Orleans. Now I’m inclined to think it was the other way around.) We’d been in correspondence for about three years, trading clips of our stories, but had never discussed the possibility of collaborating on anything. I lost no time in writing to explain what I was working on and what I had in mind.