The essay is focused on a poem by Louis Dudek, which describes an imaginary salon in the afterlife, where dead people discuss about life, death and afterlife. The background is obviously paradoxical, but the register in not ironic or sarcastic. The dead express opinions about the differences between their previous condition (life) and their present condition (death). They come to the conclusion that now they feel better than when they were alive, because they are not obliged to live the squalor of which life is often permeated.
