Talk of the Clouds

The sense of ease in friendships in the afterlife does not fail to surprise
in its felicitous serendipity. Looking out over the skyey blue panoply of souls,
both the celebrated and reknownless, an atmosphere of gracious solicitude,
instant then quickly hardening into permanence, prevails. As one
breakfasts with an unlikely troika of, say, the pop star Farrokh Bulsara (better known as
Freddie Mercury), a jolly wet-nurse who died by her own hand weeks before the
Great London Fire of 1666 and a Chicago child who fell to his death from the
window of a burning civic project building in 1973, the seeming randomness
reveals itself to not be random at all; the wry exchanges and shared drolleries
are in fact felt with a common rightness, a bond from the shared
experience that is having once been alive. The trickery of cosmic
all-knowingness bends toward comedy: golfing with Ben Franklin and other new
acquaintances, one laughs as this founding father makes a joke about a
"Slazenger 7." That Goldfinger came out 173 years after his death is
immaterial. On contemplation of how Emerson was so correct in his intimations of
the Over-soul, one can zip easily over to his mind to express one's
admiration.

Ommipresent is the triumphal certitude that there is nothing to fear.