Tag Archive for 'immortality'

Before I finished Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age in the Salt Lake City airport Monday, I found a book by Carl Sagan in the bookstore.  “The Varieties of Scientific Experience”, based on his Gifford Lectures from 1985 (and published posthumously, in 2006 by Ann Druyan).  I read half of it in the airport, and the other half last night.  It went fast, because I’d heard it all before.  The main piece of new information was that a decade and a half after the fact, Carl Sagan is truly dead to me.  I’ve read most of his books, I’ve seen his television series Cosmos several times.  I love his ideas; they’ve shaped me throughout my life, but I no longer hope to find anything new in them.  So long as there were pieces of his mind that had been recorded, but that I hadn’t yet been exposed to, it was as if he wasn’t quite gone.  He was still, from my point of view, a dynamic entity.

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