[Image: “A Hallway of Unopened Doors,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I can’t possibly need to hammer the metaphor in, can I?]

This week, whiskey river offers us a quote pulled from their commonplace book (something like a blog archive). They’ve used the same quotation in the past, and — as it happens — so have I (about five years ago), thanks to their trustworthy influence:

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing — not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision — a cocktail, a remix — of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes — we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don’t you dare.

(Caitlin Moran [source — subscription probably required])

When I used the quotation before, I didn’t know where it originally came from (book, blog post, etc.). This time around, I found the source (thanks to a generous subscription offer): an essay from The Times (i.e., of London) back in 2014. This offered me the opportunity to place it in context with the text preceding and after the quoted passage…

It turns out, see, that Caitlin Moran wasn’t really speaking of what she believed then, at the time she wrote the essay; she was thinking back to her younger self. The paragraphs preceding the excerpt above reads:

In my teens and twenties, I took after [my mother], and became a passionate advocate against any notion of an afterlife. Ninety per cent of the problems of humanity, it seemed, stemmed from a simple cognitive dissonance: refusing to acknowledge that this is it. That we are alive now, and there will be nothing else later — no second chances, no higher levels. No Heaven. No Nirvana. That if there is joy, or progress, or enlightenment, or love to be had, it must be had now: between your birth and your death; as fast and fiercely as you can. All we have is the breath in our bodies and a finite share of seconds, and each one must be spent with the same joyous reverence as a gold coin.

This is because, at 19, I’d read a sentence that had re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

So she had that one sentence’s revelation, as she describes. But then, in 2014 and not years before, after the ringing “Don’t you dare” conclusion she added:

But that, as I say, was in my twenties. Ten years later, things have changed. I want there to be an afterlife, now. I wish it devoutly — not from any unhappy desire for an afterlife to be better than this one, but from sheer curiosity.

At 38, I think when I die, I need desperately to be handed a stiff drink and be allowed to ask, “What the hell was going on all that time? Come on — why did they build Stonehenge? Where did my first passport disappear to? What were Neanderthals really like? Where did my second passport disappear to? What would the third Amy Winehouse album have sounded like? Where did I lose my wedding ring? Can I have a map of the world, in fact — with each thing I’ve lost marked with a luminous pin?”

I don’t want swan’s wings. I don’t want my own planet. I don’t want eternity. I just want to know everything, ever — then be reordered across the universe, again.

I myself have nothing I could honestly call “a belief in the afterlife.” But I love the idea of a brief but ambitious interlude of revelation which precedes the ultimate atomization of whatever the hell my self is: a chance to “know everything, ever”… or at least, maybe, the answers to twenty or a hundred questions. The last one of which would simply go something like this:

And now the very last, final thing I want to know: after I get the answer to this last question, well… what happens next?