Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know - the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar ...
In the book "MaddAddam" by Margaret Atwood, the character Glenn offers a profound observation about the nature of existence and consciousness. He suggests that the difficulty of imagining oneself as dead stems from the self-referential nature of language. When one asserts, "I’ll be dead," the use of "I" implies the speaker's continued existence, highlighting a paradox in our understanding of mortality.
Furthermore, Glenn connects this idea to the concept of God, arguing that our grammatical structures compel us to conceive of a reality beyond our comprehension. The past tense in language prompts a search for origins, leading us to question the nature of existence itself. In essence, this exploration of grammar reveals the invisible forces that shape our understanding of life, death, and the divine.
