Ear­li­er this week, Bruce J. Hill­man shared the sto­ry behind writ­ing The Man Who Stalked Ein­stein and why Jew­ish doc­tors make great writ­ers. He has been blog­ging here all week as part of the Vis­it­ing Scribe series on The ProsenPeo­ple.

I know it’s unwhole­some, but I am obsessed with the idea of an after­life. It’s not some­thing I think about every day or even once a week, but it is always is out there, resid­ing on the edge of con­scious­ness— a rid­dle, wrapped in a mys­tery, inside an enig­ma,” as Win­ston Church­hill said. Unknow­able. Untestable. Alien to my life as a scientist. 

About ten years ago, I wrote a short sto­ry titled, What Comes Next?” about a man who awak­ens in total dark­ness. He nei­ther sees nor sens­es touch but intu­its that he is con­fined in a very nar­row space. Dim­ly at first, but with increas­ing clar­i­ty, he hears a mélange of rec­og­niz­able voic­es — his rab­bi, his wife, busi­ness part­ners, an illic­it lover — relat­ing per­spec­tives that reflect the suc­cess­es and fail­ings of his life. Real­iz­ing that he is lis­ten­ing in on his own memo­r­i­al ser­vice, he comes to believe that he lies at the doorstep of the after­life. Per the title, he won­ders what comes next? His mind runs wild with pos­si­bil­i­ties. In the end, how­ev­er, the brief episode of post­mortem con­scious­ness turns out to be noth­ing more than a final pulse of neu­ro­trans­mit­ters that, once exhaust­ed, leaves noth­ing but darkness.

The doyens of my writ­ing cri­tique group uni­form­ly panned What Comes Next?” as unnec­es­sar­i­ly mor­bid and pes­simistic. No one, they pre­dict­ed, would pub­lish such a sto­ry. Their proph­e­sies proved accu­rate. After hav­ing the sto­ry reject­ed by sev­er­al obscure lit­er­ary jour­nals, I interred it in my elec­tron­ic files, nev­er, until now, to be dragged out and reconsidered. 

So why did I dig this hoary chest­nut from its cyber-rest­ing place now? Recent­ly, I sat with my wife Pam, her chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, in a steeply cant­ed uni­ver­si­ty audi­to­ri­um and lis­tened to a per­for­mance of Mes­si­ah. Han­del tends to get all the cred­it for this remark­able cre­ation. How­ev­er, the pow­er of Handel’s music is abet­ted by the prophet­ic Old Tes­ta­ment pas­sages cho­sen by Handel’s col­lab­o­ra­tor, Charles Jen­nens. Jen­nens’ selec­tions com­ple­ment han­dles soar­ing music to accen­tu­ate the cen­tral theme of Mes­si­ah—the com­ing of the Mes­si­ah, rebirth, and eter­nal life. 

Like many Jews, I have had lit­tle instruc­tion in these mat­ters. Raised in a Con­ser­v­a­tive Jew­ish fam­i­ly, the con­ver­sa­tions I heard at home and in syn­a­gogue were about this life. The empha­sis was on liv­ing a good and right­eous exis­tence for its own sake with nei­ther the promise of heav­en­ly reward nor the threat of eter­nal punishment. 

Absorbed in the music and fol­low­ing Jen­nens’ libret­to along with the choir, suf­fi­cient­ly absorbed by con­scious­ness that I could sus­pend my usu­al dis­be­lief. I asked myself: Why not an after­life? If, in fact, there is a God, and He is active in the world, and He is tru­ly omnipo­tent, as believ­ers say, was there any rea­son to doubt that He could orches­trate even the most fan­tas­ti­cal events: arrang­ing for a leap to heav­en for an overnight stay, dis­patch­ing an angel with new dic­tates inscribed on gold­en tablets, direct­ing his­to­ry towards a colos­sal end of times bat­tle between good and evil…why not any of these? For that mat­ter, why not all? Who can know the mind of God? Who can imag­ine the enor­mi­ty of his plan?

The leap to faith in an activist God is the big bite of the apple. Once that chasm is crossed, fath­om­ing an exis­tence beyond our world of the sens­es is noth­ing more than a nibble.

Bruce Hill­man is Pro­fes­sor of Radi­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia and Edi­tor-in-Chief of the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Radi­ol­o­gy. He has pub­lished eight short sto­ries and the 2010 book for lay read­ers, The Sorcerer’s Appren­tice: How Med­ical Imag­ing is Chang­ing Health Care.

Relat­ed Content:

Bruce Hill­man is Pro­fes­sor of Radi­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia and Edi­tor-in-Chief of the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Radi­ol­o­gy. He has pub­lished eight short sto­ries and the 2010 book for lay read­ers, The Sorcerer’s Appren­tice: How Med­ical Imag­ing is Chang­ing Health Care. The Man Who Stalked Ein­stein is his first non-med­ical book.