I came back from the dead for you: Are there “Messengers”?
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 11, 2009
I came back from the dead for you (July 8, 2009)
I read a couple of days ago a French novel “What after” by Guillaume Musso. The setting is invariably in the USA, more specifically in New York City, and four hours drive from the center; excluding a plane flight to San Diego. It is about the existence of living “messengers” who have the gift or the plight of forecasting the near death of people they encounter.
These messengers can see white aura “aureole” surrounding the head of the next victims of random killings, accidents, suicides, or incurable illnesses. Nathan is the hero; he got through a near death experience at the age of eight; he was given a choice to resume living and decided reluctantly to accept the invitation: He saw the love of his life suffering from terminal illness in the future, and she needed his presence to sooth the passage in her last hours among the living.
Reality is not probably what we could sense by our five senses; there are a whole lot of pseudo-realities, simply because scientists told us so, using indirect measurements, and we are ready to believe that they are facts and part of reality. So why we always need consensus to claim facts when many people witness facts that not many of us are not endowed to sense?
I noticed recently that authors insist on including a quote at the beginning of a new chapter. I like reading quotes: it confirms that people have the same thoughts and wisdom in variations of their period. It is excellent to repeat what has been written centuries ago: New generations have got to read from scratch anyway. It is good to amaze new generations that people were not as dumb as the new technologies lead them to assume about the elder generations. I like quotes; more importantly, I love to re-phrase them: it is my contribution to the older generations that I appreciate their efforts of reflection and study by offering mine.
When I am short on ideas, I can work on the style and forms. The lovely novel of Guilaume Musso includes quotes that each of the chapters exhibited at the beginning. The following quotes are of my own re-phrasing.
“How can we ever be human without faults?” (The question will always remain: what are considered faults and who has the legitimacy of identifying, describing, and judging faults?)
“You are born an aristocrat; another conquers his greatness.” (Question: what is greatness and who is legitimate to define and judge what is great?)
“We cannot cuddle at night with our celebrity” (Marlyn Monroe)
“We are slow to believe what gives us great pain to believe in” (Ovid)
“The dead are invisible; they are not absent” (St. Augustin)
“Events don’t necessarily arrive as you wish; learn to watch events as they come” (Epictetus)
“In reality we know nothing; truth is in the bottom of the abyss” (Democritus)
“The time to learn to live; it is already too late” (Aragon)
“We are young once: we have an entire life to recall our youth” (Barry Levinson)
“Love is the folly of friendship” (Seneque)
“From death, our cities are totally defenseless” (Epicure)
“It is of love that we are always suffering” (Christian Bobin)
“Nothing is lost: it has been returned” (Epictetus). (The trick to return whatever is lost, in grace as gift)
“A bungled job at the end of life is worse than death”
There are a few other lovely ideas that I pick up here and there such as my own quotes:
“The center of the universe is constantly shifting; it does not venture far away: the center is the detail in a task that focuses all your attention”
“Not many tasks are boring routines: all you need to do is attaching a metaphor to the task. When you wash the dishes in the evening, it could mean washing off the dregs of the day that you had to endure. Have good dreams.”
Adonis Diaries 
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