Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives message of the book is the importance of exploring new ideas beyond the ones that have been traditionally passed down. The title word "Sum" refers to the Latin for "I am," as in "Cogito ergo sum". Like Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities", "Sum" does not fit entirely into the traditional category of a novel. "Sum" has been called "philosofiction", an "experimental novel", and "a collection of thought experiments". Most of the stories are understood to "posit the afterlife as mirroring life on Earth" The New York Times Book Review called Sum a "delightful, thought-provoking little collection [which] belongs to that category
Mr. Cogito Mr. Cogito appears in the following books of poetry by Herbert: "Mr. Cogito" is a book of poems by Zbigniew Herbert. First published in 1974, the first mention of its possible release dates back to 1969. Four years later, in January 1973, the Catholic weekly "Tygodnik Powszechny" published to great popular acclaim one poem from the planned volume, the iconic "Przesłanie Pana Cogito" ("The Message of Mr. Cogito"). The collection ultimately consisted of 40 poems, which build up the drama around its single main character, Mr. Cogito. Mr. Cogito, who is involved in all the monologues and dialogues in the