I have landed on Iwo Jima. I have died in the mud of the Western Front.
I know this the way you know something you cannot unlearn. Not as belief exactly. As memory that does not belong to this life and yet will not leave.
This novel began there.
I wrote God Is Everything to lay out what I understand about consciousness, about what God is, and about what happens when we die. The argument in that book is that consciousness does not end. It persists, moves on, and finds new form, and the soul is older than any single body it occupies.
That framework works as philosophy. What it cannot do is show you what any of it looks like from the inside. Fiction can, which is why this book exists as a novel, not another chapter.
What does reincarnation look like from the inside?
Ordinary, mostly, which is the part nobody writes.
If reincarnation is real then somebody walked through the siege of Tenochtitlan carrying the weight of a particular betrayal they had no words for. Somebody sat in a room in Vienna in 1895 and experienced a recognition so precise and so old that no psychology Freud had yet invented had a name for it.
What I wanted was the ordinary texture of extraordinary circumstances. The toothache in seventh century Basra. The bad light on a Tuesday in fifteenth century Florence. An arm rising toward something far away for a reason the body cannot explain.
Grand history is easy to write and it is not what a life feels like from within.
The book on this: Reincarnation follows two souls across eighty-two thousand years, told through historical chapters, regression sessions in 1971, and the soul sequences between them.
What is the love story in Reincarnation?
The longest one I know how to tell.
Two souls finding each other across eighty-two thousand years of depicted history. A fragment of a connection with no beginning that either of them can locate, surfacing again and again in different bodies, different centuries, and different circumstances.
In 1971, two people sit in a therapy office in New Haven carrying something across all of it that neither can consciously access.
I did not expect the structure to carry that as well as it does. Historical chapters, therapy sessions, and soul sequences running between them. It works, and I was surprised by how much.
How far back does the book go?
Seventy-eight thousand years, to an overhang in East Africa.
A woman comes back to camp with a steenbok across her shoulders and the smell of blood worked deep into her hair. The group has already settled for the night. She hears the children before she sees the fire, their voices dropping as the dark comes on and the bush presses in close around the overhang, patient and enormous.
She ducks under the low shelf of rock, lets the animal slide from her shoulders near the coals, and that is when she sees him.
No exposition, no framing, and nothing to signal which two people these are. The recognition happens on the page the way it happens to them, which is before anybody has language for it.
What do the historical chapters look like?
They are places on ordinary days, described by somebody standing in them.
Tenochtitlan in 1521. The market at Tlatelolco runs as far as he can see in every direction. Sixty thousand people on a market day and more at festivals, a number so large it has stopped meaning anything except noise and heat and the smell of fresh tortillas and cacao and the blood of the animal stalls and the specific salt-rot of the dye quarter. He has walked through it since he was a child and the size of it still does something to him.
A casualty clearing station in Pas-de-Calais in 1916. The ward smells of carbolic and, underneath the carbolic, of something the carbolic cannot reach. Nurse Agnes Parr has been there seven months and no longer notices it. She notices it now because the man in bed fourteen has it, and bed fourteen sits far enough from the door that the cross-draft does not reach.
That is the texture I wanted. A woman noticing a smell she had stopped noticing, in a specific bed, at a specific distance from a door.
What happens in Frances Webb’s office?
Two people arrive nine minutes late and something has changed since the previous week.
Frances notes the time and then tells herself she has not. The charge that ran between Diana and Ruth in that room, and the careful way they avoided looking at each other, has gone. What replaced it is rawer.
Diana keeps her coat on for the first four minutes. Ruth sits as far to one side of her chair as the chair allows, shoulder turned fractionally away.
Then Diana takes her coat off.
That is how the 1971 chapters work. Nothing supernatural is required for a therapist to read a room, and the regression sessions are considerably more effective for sitting inside an ordinary professional setting where somebody is paying attention to who sits where.
What is the present-day story?
A marriage in a backyard in 1963 and everything that follows it.
The ceremony was in Vera Adelman’s backyard on a Saturday in June. Twelve people. Folding chairs on the grass. Somebody had strung paper lanterns between the fence and the oak tree and the lanterns moved in the early evening air. There was food on a table by the back door, the things people bring. A casserole, bread, and a cake that leaned slightly to one side, which Ruth had made herself the night before and which Diana looked at with the expression she used for things she found endearing.
Eighty-two thousand years of recognition, and the chapter that has to carry the weight is twelve people on folding chairs and a cake that leans.
If the modern story does not work, none of the rest of it does. That is the part I was most careful with.
Do you have to believe in reincarnation to read the book?
No, and the novel does not ask you to.
You do not need to believe in past lives or souls or anything outside a conventional life. What the book asks for is simpler. The willingness to follow two people across a very long time and to feel what it costs them to keep finding each other.
I am also a Christian, and I hold both without contradiction. God is everything, and that includes the part of everything which persists across lives, accumulates experience, and reaches toward recognition across centuries without knowing why it is reaching.
Are the historical chapters accurate?
They are memory, and memory is never clean. The book says so before it starts.
Diana and Ruth are modern people. Educated, analytical, shaped by the twentieth century, looking backward through an accumulation of lives layered on lives going back further than recorded history. What surfaces in Frances Webb’s office is not a documentary record.
Think about your own childhood. You remember it, and your memories are reconstructions shaped by what you felt at the time, what you learned later, the stories your family told, and a thousand small distortions between an event and its recall. Researchers who study memory find, consistently, that people are certain of things that did not happen and wrong about things that did.
Now multiply that by eighty-two thousand years and hundreds of lives.
What Diana and Ruth reach is real. The emotional truth, the recognition, the connection across time. The details may be compressed, blurred, or filtered through who they happen to be in 1971. Some of it is exact. Some of it is the shape of a thing rather than the thing itself.
How does Reincarnation relate to God Is Everything?
One argues it and the other inhabits it.
God Is Everything is a framework, and a framework can be examined, agreed with, or rejected on its own terms. It cannot make you feel what a claim would mean if it were true.
This is the same position with a body attached to it, in two people, across a very long time. That is what novels are for and it is the only reason to write one about a subject you have already argued in nonfiction.
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