It seems too bad that heaven should always be somehow repugnant, and unfit as it were for human habitation. Isn't there something we can do about it?
I fear there is not.
"But I just hate the idea of floating"
Assuming that we are immortal, what happens to a man when he dies? It is said by some that at first the surroundings in his new life seem shadowy, but after a bit they grow solid; and then it is the world left behind that seems vague. You lose touch with it and with those whom you knew there—except when they think of you. When they think of you, although you can see them, and feel what they're thinking, it isn't like hearing the words that they say, or their voices; it's not like looking over their shoulders to see what they write; it's more like sensing what is in their thoughts.
But at first you are too bewildered to do this. You are in a new world, and you find yourself surrounded by spirits, telling you that you're dead. The spiritualists say that many new arrivals refuse to believe they are dead, and look around skeptically at heaven, and think they are dreaming. It often takes a long time to convince them. This must be rather awkward. It's as though no one who arrived in Chicago would believe he was there, but went stumbling around, treating citizens as though they weren't real, and saying that he doubted whether there was any such place as Chicago.
But if there is any truth in this picture, it explains a great deal. If the spirits themselves cannot clearly take in their new life at first, how can we on this side of the barrier ever understand what it's like? And, not understanding, what wonder we don't find it attractive?
You can't describe one kind of existence to those in another.
Suppose, for example, we were describing dry land to a fish.
"We have steam-heat and sun-sets," I might tell him—just for a beginning.