Radiolab - 15: Sum

Episode Date: August 14, 2009

For meditation number fifteen we have a reading from David Eagleman's book Sum. It's a vision of the after life that's both playful and... horrifying. Sum is read by actor Jeffrey Tambor.

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We're up to number 15 now. As you can tell the last few days, we've been extending our afterlife show. The opera or the after afterlife. Exactly. And for number 15, we have a reading from David Eagleman's book, Some, a story called Some, which is, in fact, the story that got us interested in doing the entire afterlife show to begin with. Yeah, because it is so, it's so summary, actually, in the S-U-M-M-A-R-Y sense. Right.

And it's read for us again by actor Jeffrey Tambor. All right. Take two. In the afterlife, you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events. re-shuffled into a new order. You see, all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. For instance, you spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for 30 years without opening your eyes. For five months straight, you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all 27 intense hours of it,

bones, great, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. But once you make it through, it's It's agony free for the rest of your afterlife. That doesn't always mean. It's pleasant. I mean, you spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. 18 months waiting in line. Two years of boredom,

staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal, waiting on line. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, though, and you itch because you can't take a shower until it's your time to take your marathon 200-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body's falling.

77 hours of confusion. One hour realizing you've forgotten someone's name. Three weeks realizing you're wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry.

15 hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. 67 days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving loss, three days calculating restaurant tips, 51 days deciding what to wear, nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money, 18 hours staring into the refrigerator. 34 days longing, six months watching commercials, four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there's something better I could be doing with my time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers, four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order.

of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your earthly life. And the thought is blissful. A life where episodes are split into tiny, swallowable pieces. Moments do not endure. Where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child, hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand. That was actor Jeffrey Tambour, reading a story from David Eagleman's book, Some, and the story was called Some. Some. Yeah. So before we, we have some time left. Some. I just want to mention what's coming up tomorrow, because this is like a little sort of spectacular celebration of death that we've been doing all week. But now we're going to switch

on Friday. That is the fifth day of this sequence. Number 16. Number 16, we are going to go the other direction. We're going to celebrate the things that death ends. We're going to talk about the gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous business in peeing the live. Actually, there's no talking in this one. No, we're not, yeah. We're going to actually ask you to look at something. A video by a guy named Will Hoffman, really talented dude. We are so proud of it.

Yeah, so that's coming up tomorrow, I guess. For the moment that we have to go, I'm Chad Aboumrod. And I'm Robert Crilwich. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation.