Dancers on the surface of an abyss

The last chapter will reveal all. 

All the twists and turns of my odyssey will be untangled and woven together into the complex tapestry of this mixed metaphor of my life.

I am not ready to think about how this story could end and sent to the printer and all the pages bound into a book. Bound like a hostage and placed on a remainder table with the other literary remains.

Instead of a physical object made of ink and paper there might only be a collection of unbound electronic messages in a cloud.

 I like to imagine one of these messages striking like lightning, lighting the sky and crashing into the earth and really shaking people up. Waking them up from this collective anxiety dream.

It might be news of something that happened a quarter of a century past, I don’t know. I don’t want a story that is like one of those celebrity bios where the only interesting part is in the beginning and tells how I happened to do the thing that made me famous and the rest of the book is a boring slog through ordinary life with occasional celebrity appearances and recipes.

If I become famous I might never know about it. I need to appreciate obscurity and learn to function in the dark. 

I don’t know how to prove I have an immortal soul and I don’t know how to prove I don’t have an immortal soul, any more than I can imagine the limits of the universe or the beginning and end of space and time and what possible initial situation preceded the birth of the cosmos. 

Imagine your soul was conceived simultaneously with everything else in a Big Bang or small whimper in the void.

Scenarios for an unending afterlife sound wearisome and unsatisfactory, even as an infinite series of reincarnations, of possible births, lives, and deaths, perhaps learning from my successes and failures and evolving, also seem unsatisfactory, but maybe the point of existence isn’t satisfaction, because satisfactions are contingent, and some say one can be liberated from the wearisome life and death cycle through the cessation of craving but I don’t know, I don’t know.

Some people believe we are living in the last chapter of history and that prophecies written in the Christian Bible are being fulfilled, signs of the End Times are appearing. When the Bible was being edited and the canon was being established the inclusion of the book of Revelation was controversial. It’s position at the end makes it seem like the conclusion of a narrative begun with Genesis, as if written by the same author at a desk in Eternity, rather than a collection of documents organized by a committee.

When people invented books they began to imagine that the world is a book and a human life is a book. We now live in a time when books are no longer books.

Read the chapters of my story in any order, the book of my life is unbound.

The pages fall like snow from the clouds.