Among you, I see former postmen, four invaluable dental assistants (all were blond and coincidentally named “Sandy”). Back there, transformed today, we have a man from Estonia who drowned and the complete stranger who saw him going under, stopped the car, plunged off a bridge to save him, and drowned trying. Yes, we’ve put you side by side, how lovely, look at them clinging. —Say hello. You’ll know each other here.

Your life alone did not win you Paradise. Your dying did, new children. Yours showed acceptance, subtlety, patience with a bad plan that none of us created. You opened to it, let it roll through you like smoke.

—Perpetual glee is spread luminous before you. And your joy is not just cavorting on those wings (low-maintenance, two in number, semipermeable, and soon as easy to use as were your earthly eyes). No, Heaven’s truest reward is the good company of your cocitizens. Even here, God is best seen refracted among the varieties of human character.

Timbre-Red: III

One of our surprising customs is a pleasure largely unpracticed on Earth for decades: I mean Uninterrupted Visiting. “Hell is other people,” wrote one sad man.

—But, you see, if Hell is other people, so is Heaven.

Heaven is just Other other people.

Imagine speaking steadily, commingling your wings, merging your new skin salamander-fine with, say, Plato? Leonardo, Bach, Mozart, Jane Austen, Rembrandt—who’d still rather draw and does so with a finger in the air. You’re comfortable with George Eliot, Chekhov, Thelonious Sphere Monk, Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, Billie Holiday, and one of the Wright brothers (I can never remember which, but he’s definitely on my side of the antiwing debate).

We’ve Shakespeare (a sexual athlete and absolute stitch). Shakespeare and Lincoln have become inseparable here lately, thick as thieves; Shakespeare thinks he invented Lincoln and—a very funny man, his sense of humor dark as corn syrup—Lincoln lets Shakespeare. Typical.

Einstein always mostly wanted to play his violin better and now he’s cosmically fantastical at that. He’ll engage in physics shoptalk solely by performing Mozart, Brahms, and a little Korngold. Buster Keaton, when things get slow, does one of his “falls”—going straight down through clouds, you’ll love it. George Washington? He’s always just sort of standing around, lovely man I guess, but has nothing to say. Jefferson? In Hell. Go figure. —Gandhi, surprisingly, is something of a stick. We do have Henry James, fine company, but—even by our eternal standards—God love him—he can go on.

All these and you are interchangeable, best friends. You have entered a domain of ease and genius known as Play. Competition has been forever expunged. Here, everyone’s achievement becomes everyone’s, circular. The glad ironies pile up.