99 Stories of God Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t know, I said.
    The Book of Q invites us to contemplate the fleeting duration of all that we cherish, the brevity of life and the inexorability of death.
    Help, help, help, I thought. Please.
    She stopped talking for a few moments. But still nobody came. Then she said, Chrysalis is the same as pupa, but the one word is so much more lovely and promising, wouldn’t you say?
    Then she seemed to fall asleep and said nothing further. When someone finally did arrive, it was her they came for. They let her go first.

Jail
     

42
     
    The Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg wrote a book called Heaven and Hell in which he describes the afterlife.
    After dropping the physical body, souls transit into an intermediate realm where they meet dead friends and relatives.
    Following a period of self-examination, they are compelled to go to a particular afterlife world—either a “heaven” or a “hell.”
    Hell is unpleasant.
    Heaven is more pleasant.
    In heaven as well as hell, people work, play, get married, and even indulge in war and crime. Both realms also have social structures and government.
    One may progress through various levels of heaven or hell, with the exception that one is never able to leave heaven or hell.

Pretty Much the Same, Then
     

43
     
    They had been married for thirty-five years.
    When the occasion arose, she preferred to use the word pantomnesia , he the term déjà vu .
    She argued that pantomnesia has Greek roots meaning “all” or “universal”— panto —and “mind” or “memory”— mnesia —and therefore is a more technically accurate term.
    He suggested that she was a snob.
    She said that déjà vu simply means “already seen” and refers specifically to visual experience, when there is so much, so very much more in experiencing the unfamiliar as familiar.
    He reminded her that they had had this conversation before.

Her Eyes Were Set Rather Close Together, Which Gave Her an Urgent Air
     

44
     
    A doctor of veterinary medicine who adored cats and frequently treated them at the expense of his other patients, some of whom actually died for lack of immediate care while he was attending to the cats, was killed in a one-car accident while driving home at vesper time when he swerved to avoid hitting a cat and struck a tree.
    The cat was inexplicably sitting in the middle of the road.

The Individualist
     

45
     
    In 1994, in Beverly Hills, California, a former football star, O. J. Simpson, was accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a luckless young man who had gone to her house to return a pair of sunglasses she had left at a restaurant. The murders were particularly brutal. The woman’s throat was cut from ear to ear, resulting in partial decapitation. The young waiter, Ronald Goldman, also had his throat severed.
    During the course of the trial, a molecular biologist and director of the nation’s largest DNA-testing firm, Dr. Robin Cotton, testified that the blood found near the victims could have come from only one person in 170 million people. That blood matched O. J. Simpson’s blood.
    Further, blood found on a sock in Simpson’s bedroom was consistent with that of only one person out of 6.8 billion— more people than there were on earth at the time—and that blood matched the blood of Nicole Brown Simpson.
    O. J. Simpson was, nonetheless, found not guilty and was acquitted of murder.
    Courtroom analysts have concluded that most jurors find DNA analysis “boring.”

Numbers
     

46
     
    Ted Kaczynski, who sent a number of letter bombs through the mail to individuals he believed were harming the environment through technology, hubris, and greed, was arrested shortly after two major newspapers in the United States, the Washington Post and the New York Times, agreed to publish his ten-thousand-word manifesto in their pages. Kaczynski, in his brief career, killed three individuals and maimed a few more with his bombs. He is now serving what is described as