Yes, we have a Heavenly Choir but its chapel master is not J. S. Bach. Bach feels happy to serve as second in command under one Thomas K. Pine, a former Baptist “Minister of Music” at Hot Springs, Arkansas, whose compositional gifts are, according to Bach, “one hundred thousand times my own.”

Thomas K. Pine was leading a huge youth choir through his own brilliant contrapuntal setting of “Nearer My God to Thee.” This happened in 1901 in a park’s green metal band-shell during a July Fourth celebration when, soaked from the sudden downpour, Mr. Pine was struck and killed by lightning at the age of twenty. For Heaven, the gangly red-haired boy proved something of a shoo-in. Now Bach goes to school to Thomas K. Pine and we’re all the richer for their daily playing. Trust me.

Tips on Things to Try First? You have sudden access to all languages and patois, all facts and contradictions of intergalactic history, and these are constantly at play, as Heaven is daylight steadily. Your mind can go anywhere, can become anyone in any language of any period; some of you have always known this. But here, see, you enjoy God’s own fact-finding support system, all the enabling knowledge ever available—now yours.

Which fact to pull forth as your initiating example? I do love examples, don’t you? Heavenly light has the yellow-white clarity of Fairy Tale, of pure Continuous Example. May I ask someone to volunteer the name of a well-known historical figure? Good, “Elizabeth the First.” I should warn you that, here at the beginning, it’s all going to sound like we’re all constantly showing off, umkay? —But, what real-life Elizabethanism presently seems most striking? well …

On the day Elizabeth decided if she should execute Mary Queen of Scots, she prayed for some omen. Queen Bess—carrot-topped and balding, pockmarked, beaky, brilliant—did, of course, feel a certain poisonous jealousy toward all usurping Papist cousins, especially prettier younger female ones.