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When We Die

Paté, a horse, an earthworm

The Party At The End

I explained: “There was a bright flash of light, the most beautiful thing you ever saw. Then came a wave of heat. It was so painful it was almost luxuriant. Then I began to feel myself melt. And then . . . then I was preparing for this party.”

The Man In The Control Booth

Wycke, I knew, had thought of his eyes as prisms, capable of seeing many points of view at once. They sat in deep dark sockets, alert, cautious, and ever vulnerable, like two small animals uneasy in their burrows.

Sunbeams

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.

George Bernard Shaw

Sunbeams

Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Teilhard de Chardin

Selected Stories

She grew up and retreated into a tower, where she lived for 20 years. No one understood this. Her friends thought perhaps she’d gone mad. When she emerged, she could fly. Everyone was very impressed, watching her fly over the sea.

Cholestiatoma

Cholestiatoma is a loving beast; as with other cancers, he comes like a string around the finger, a chain around the throat, to insure that we do not idly forget why we are here. Cholestiatoma (Chole when masculine, Choleste when feminine) lives in my skull between the meninges and the right orbit.

Sunbeams

It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

Alfred Adler

Seth On Suicide

Seth’s oceanic desire is to remind us that no death comes unbidden, that death is as spontaneous a creation as our own lives, engineered by our beliefs, which, no matter how distorted, cannot destroy in some final deed of discipline the impulse to be.

Celebrating Seth

Seth is an elder but an equal, who insists, “Basically you are no more of a physical being than I am, and I have donned and discarded more bodies than I care to tell. . . . Consciousness creates form. It is not the other way around. . . .”