Awakenings

Dear Readers,

Your weekend is almost at an end, and so I feel somewhat like a tender rumination on some strange topic.

I think what I will talk about is awakening here at the University. Everyone's awakening is slightly different, and we have to calibrate it based on the background culture that they died in. It's tricky, you know. An insufficiently progressive mind from a sufficiently backwards era can react very strongly, and negatively, to sudden awakening in the wrong era. Likewise, belief systems seem to have a strong effect on how people cope with it. The very religious are often quite distraught to find that they are not in the heaven they expected. Sorry, atheists, the surprise at finding anything at all doesn't mix well with you either. Agnostics, with low expectations, tend to be the easiest. Most everyone adjusts eventually anyway.

Unfortunately, life at the University isn't really an afterlife at all. What came before is only a copy, really, as well as what comes after. We are not quite who our memories tell us we are, or at least my friends who work on quantum philosophy tell me that we are not. It is a question that consumes some of our more isolated cohort here at the University, and one that I muse on when I am not translating a work or writing some piece.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople