Last Stories and Other Stories

SUPERNATURAL AXIOMS

1. To the extent that the dead live on, the living must resemble them.

2. Confessing such resemblance, we should not reject the possibility that we might at this very moment be dead.

3. Since life and death are the only two states which we can currently postulate, then to the extent that they are the same, immortality, and even eternal consciousness, seems possible.

a. We do not remember what we might have been before birth. This, and only this, gives hope of oblivion. — Insufficient!

b. Many religions, not to mention our own egocentric incapacity to imagine the world without us, collude in asserting the existence of an afterlife.

c. The universe is at best indifferent. Since eternal consciousness would be the worst torture possible, and God’s own writings under various aliases hint at such a possibility, why not expect it?

d. Besides, a ghost told me so.