Book Review: 100 Places to See After You Die

Title: 100 Places to See After You Die 

Author: Ken Jennings

Date: 2023

Publisher: Scribner

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3161-5

Quote: "There’s no way to know for sure where you’re going when you die— and it might, of course, be nowhere. But this book isn’t just for armchair adventurers. Why not start assembling your own afterlife travel checklist now? If the gloomy Hel of the Vikings appeals to your inner goth, you’ll need to start offering sacrifices to the old Norse gods and avoiding— at all costs!— a brave death in battle. If the blissful Pure Land of East Asian Buddhism is more your speed, start chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha to yourself every day, because you’ll never understand the dharma without him."

Last winter I wrote about the multitude of different beliefs found among Christians about what happens after we die. What do near-death visions mean? How literally true is it that, with our departing breath, our consciousness leaves our mortal bodies and goes on to something new? If the Bible's clearest vision of an afterlife, on closer examination, makes no logical sense, what does that tell us? I think it's clear that even the resurrection Jesus described was only a metaphor for something our mortal brains can't imagine. 

Trivia king Ken Jennings evidently thinks something similar, but his answer to the same question is of course much more vividly detailed. And it's funny, in a way. Nobody could possibly believe this or that metaphor to be literally true, and yet everyone recognizes that there's something to it...Buddhist countries have notoriously been the home of art, entertainment, even parks, depicting the cosmic punishments for various sins in ways that are sobering and also funny. Jennings has achieved a similar effect by writing about various visions of the afterlife in tour-guide style. Readers are strolling with him through a literary amusement park, considering the rich variety of metaphors various artists and writers have developed for the idea of rewards and punishments in the afterlife. At the same time, the effect on a reflective reader should be to encourage reflection on the sort of afterlives we're in the process of earning.

There are, Jennings shows us, dozens of different visions of Good and Bad Places even within the same religious traditions. Dante's Inferno, a satire on contemporary issues, went far beyond the Bible's few references to the real probability that an ancient Israelite who died poor or unpopular (or wanted to spare person's family the cost of burial) would be burned in the big garbage dump at Gehenna where the fires were never quenched. Milton's Paradise Lost made an ancient sermon on the death of an ancient king into a brilliant study of a personality destroyed by narcissism. C.S. Lewis's attempt to describe a Heaven with room for picture-book scenes and characters, in The Last Battle, also rates a chapter in Jennings' discussion of literary afterlives, as does Sartre's vision of Hell as a boardinghouse where uncongenial people have to share a room, and Lewis's more serious vision of Hell-and/or-Purgatory as a gloomy place where people have to go on being their joyless mundane selves until they're ready to let go of their cherished sins and get into Heaven. So do several other fictional afterlives 

Twentieth century pop culture's riffs on the themes of resurrection and reincarnation, though hardly on the levels of Dante and Milton, have likewise used familiar folklore as a base for a story used to make a social point. Jennings describes several TV and movie mixes of wisdom and tackiness: In "My Mother the Car," the character's mother was reincarnated as an antique car the character had to drive and maintain. Different "Twilight Zone" shows, written by different people, presented different afterlife visions; in one episode a man refused to go to what he thought was Heaven without his dog, then found himself and his dog in Heaven where they learned that the place that barred dogs was Hell. The lists of TV and movie afterlives is quite long, though a question arises whether the imagery really makes enough different metaphoric points to justify referring to the afterlife at all, whether some of these stories wouldn't have been better told as ordinary stories about good and bad vacation tours...

There are those who take the afterlife too seriously to feel comfortable with fiction or jokes about the different metaphors humans have used to talk about it. I, as this review shows, am not one of those people. Neither is Jennings. If you are not one of those people, either, you'll probably enjoy this book. It's not really a frivolous or blasphemous book, since the target of satirical wit is the shortcomings of humans' metaphors. It might tend to encourage the folly of someone so determined to choose stupidity that person can't even see the benefit of accepting Pascal's Wager, but then again it might tend to encourage a serious, religious sort of reader to consider what person does believe and how person is preparing for the Final Judgment person believes in.