Life After God

I just finished this book by one of my favorite authors, Douglas Coupland. It is amazing. It's a collection of short stories on the themes of spirituality and the seemingly unanswerable questions and longings we experience as we cope with reality, modernity, and adulthood. I can't recommend it enough. We'll probably be using it here and there for the Wheatland discussion group (soon to be started as soon as Log and I move in). For now, an excerpt from the short story My Hotel Year:

Once, on a morning after a particularly noisy night, Cathy and I were walking down Drake Street and we saw a crow standing in a puddle, motionless, the sky reflected on its surface so that it looked as though the crow was standing on the sky. Cathy then told me that she thinks that there is a secret world just underneath the surface of our own world. She said that the secret world was more important than the one we live in. "Just imagine how surprised fish would be," she said, "if they knew all that was going on just on the other side of the water. Or just imagine yourself being able to breathe underwater and living with the fish. The secret world is that close and it's that different."

I said that the secret world reminded me of the world of sleep where time and gravity and things like that don't matter. She said that maybe they were both the same thing.

Currently Listening:
Alexi Murdoch