David McElroy

I knew I was dead, but I wasn’t upset about that. I just felt shame that I didn’t have more to show for the life I had left behind.

This was different from any dream I’ve ever had. It felt more real than anything from waking life. At times, it was more beautiful and loving than anything I’ve experienced on this Earth. At other times, it was painful and I felt shame.

But I was asleep — and I’m not dead — so it had to be a dream.

This was the second time lately that I’ve dreamed about my death. The first time, I just dreamed that I had died. I saw my body as though I was a spirit who had left it. But the second time — this past Saturday night — was much more than that. It was a dream about meeting God and talking about the life I had left behind.

I was in the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, but I can’t describe it. The scene was dominated, though, by an intense light that was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It was brighter than any light I’ve experienced, but it didn’t hurt my eyes to look at it.

From that light, I felt what 19th century minister Charles Finney called “waves and waves of liquid love.” I felt small. I felt ashamed of my inadequacy. But I knew that this Creator of all the universe loved me unconditionally. I knew that this place was my home.

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Donald Trump is so shamelessly corrupt that he’s not even trying to hide the corruption anymore. And his adoring followers worship him so much that they accept whatever outrage he pretends is normal.

Trump is evil and corrupt, but those followers who enable this evil and corruption are downright obscene. You know who you are.

No U.S. president has ever been brazen enough to openly accept a bribe worth nearly half a billion dollars, but that’s what Trump is doing. And he’s even bragging that the bribe is coming at no cost to taxpayers. What a deal, huh?

Trump announced Sunday night that shady Middle Eastern oil billionaires are giving him his very own Boeing 747. Isn’t that kind of them? They must be really kind-hearted to hand out luxury jetliners without expecting anything in return. And that’s what Trump and his kleptocrats expect you to believe. Are you that stupid?

Here’s the scam. The government of Qatar — a tiny old kingdom run by corrupt oil billionaires — is going to give this luxury airliners to the U.S. government for Trump to use as Air Force One. At the end of his term, this fancy plane will be transferred to the foundation for Trump’s future presidential library — so Trump will continue to have exclusive use of it.

Seriously. That’s the deal. And if you think they expect nothing for this, you’re an idiot.

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For most of my life, I had generally avoided novels written before I was born. They were stodgy. The language was outdated. They were boring. Even if they were significant in the historical sense, I saw them as the literary equivalent of reading the King James Version of the Bible.

I was wrong, of course, but I didn’t realize that until the last decade or so. I first started reading English translations of some Russian classics. I came to love Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” among others.

Then a friend introduced me to German novelist Hermann Hesse. To one extent or another, I found that I loved “Steppenwolf,” “Siddhartha,” “Narcissus and Goldmund” and “The Glass Bead Game.” I’ve read “Narcissus and Goldmund” four times so far — and I keep finding new things to appreciate about it.

But I was slow to appreciate the English writer Charles Dickens — and I’ve come to understand that this has meant depriving myself of a kind of literary joy that I haven’t experienced for a long time. I just finished the Dickens novel, “David Copperfield,” a few hours ago — and I’d like to suggest that this book is better than almost any fiction that’s been written since I was born.

I’m left feeling serious regret that I’ve had such a huge hole in my education about literature and human existence.

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