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Comment by tmikaeld | Hacker News Reader

Beautifully said, reminds me of "All these years, all these memories, there was you. You pulled me through time." from the fountain.

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I'm rewatching Midnight Mass on Netflix with my wife. They have some very powerful monologues on death. This is one that occurred to me just now, when two characters are discussing what they believe happens after death:

"When I die, my body stops functioning. Five minutes later, my brain cells start dying. But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT – the psychedelic drug released when we dream – so I dream. I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. Just the last dump of DMT all at once, and my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this firework display of memories and imagination.

My mind’s rifling through the memories, long and short term, and the dreams mix with the memories. And it’s a curtain call. One last great dream as my mind empties the fuckin’ missile silos, and then I stop.

My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me.

No pain, no memory, no awareness that I ever was.

That I ever hurt someone.

That I ever killed someone.

Everything is as it was before me.

All of the other little things that make me up – the microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating. And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life and I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.”

https://adrianvstheworld.com/2021/10/05/midnight-mass-and-th...

And, another moving monologue, this one's a spoiler so heads up: https://www.reddit.com/r/HauntingOfHillHouse/comments/pxw74y...

Either way, this show hit me unexpectedly. One of my favorite "deep watches" in a long time.

I also find comfort in the idea of becoming food after we die. I remember reading somewhere how a beached whale in the arctic can be a life-saving windfall for the scavengers there. Helped me see the positive in something I’d always seen as purely tragic.

Same here. It's helpful insofar as any story can be helpful in the face of what we have to go through.

Interestingly enough, although my wife shares the same beliefs as me in terms of religion and God, the stories that resonate most with her from that show were the evocative ones about God and heaven. She told me that the science-based ones barely register to her at all, and almost not at all on an emotional level. As I heard the other character describe her idea of heaven, I too feel the pull of those descriptions. There's a part of me that agrees with the character when he says, after listening to her speech, wiping away tears, "I really hope you're right."

Most people think of heaven when it comes to the Bible's view of life after death, but it speaks more about a resurrection from the dead for the vast majority of people who die, to live forever on a paradise Earth.

There is something in us that makes us yearn for more than the short lives we have now (hardly anybody would choose to die if they had good health under normal circumstances), so these do resonate with us more than a purely materialistic world view, which has ostensibly left people with lack of contentment and sense of purpose.

It's a real danger that we'll have to deal with on a sociological level soon. Atheism is on the rise. I'm not versed in atheism as it occurs in countries other than in the US, but it seems like we'll see new types of problems that are not immediately apparent. That's the double-edged sword of rationalism. Truth and reason above all... But it's vital to remember that we're squishy and mushy and spiritual and emotional beings. It seems like it will be a lot of fun to be involved in media as it comes to deal with that shift more and more. What stories make the most sense, while still holding truth at the center? What do people need?

I'm reminded of the prototypical Alan Watts lectures. He might be out of fashion at the moment, but maybe his work will one day again be a little flicker in the cave for us to reach for, down the line.

if you didn't know, an Alan Watts lecture plays a part in puzzle video game The Witness.

Sweet! I'll check it out. He also shows up in the movie Her... Maybe prescient haha

I find little comfort in it. By the time your 120-200 imperial pounds becomes food, you will have shat another 25,000 pounds that has gone into a sewer or elsewhere and fed some bacteria down the line.

I mean, isn't that just a demonstration of how there's interconnection between it all?

Thanks for mentioning this show, I sought it out and watched it on Netflix on the basis of your mentioning this depth of dialogue. And it was fantastic. I tend to skip past the "horror" genre because I've generally found it quite singularly un-cerebral. Midnight Mass was great, and it was primarily the quality of the dialogue that made it so, which, ironically, many reviews have deducted stars for.

The delivery of the dialogue by Hamish Linklater is also something to behold.

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