L'Apres-Vie

Artur Schopenhauer wrote that death is not to be feared, as it is simply a return to the state of unbeing--a state we all occupied before conception and birth.

Or, as Mark Twain far more accessibly put it, the idea of death didn't bother him, since he'd been dead for millions of years before he was born, and it had never caused him the slightest inconvenience whatsoever.

The admirable Mr. Clemens expounded upon this idea in his personal creed, which first saw the light of day in 1973, when it was published in What is Man? And Other Philosophical Writings (Stanford: University of California Press):

There may be a hereafter and there may not be. I am wholly indifferent about it. If I am appointed to live again I feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a straw about it.

Whether there is or there isn't any continued consciousness or existence after we croak is something I don't know and neither do you and neither does anyone else on the planet. It is also not something I waste a lot of time thinking about. But if, on the off chance, there IS an afterlife, my own personal preference would be to spend a few billion millennia yacking with some of the greatest and most interesting talkers humanity's ever produced.

After shuffling off this vale of tears, I'd invite (left to right and then clockwise) Sigmund Freud, Joseph Heller, Joseph Pulitzer, Leon Trotsky, Noam Chomsky, Richard Hofstadter, the aforementioned Mr. Twain, and Herbert Bayard Swope to sit around my celestial salon and just gab.

To the best of my knowledge, none of them ever met each other. Pulitzer and Twain were roughly contemporaries, as were Freud, Trotsky, and Swope. Swope actually worked for Joseph Pulitzer for a while, but by the time Swope came to work for the New York World, Pulitzer's paper, Pulitzer was essentially an absentee despot who ruled his paper from his yacht via telephone, telegrams, and letters, and I know of no evidence they ever met. Hofstadter, Heller, and Chomsky all lived and worked throughout the twentieth century in pretty close proximity (Chomsky is still alive and active), but I don't know if they ever met.

But wouldn't a confab between these guys be something to witness? Almost makes one wish one could believe.