A Supermarket in California carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to experience complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life. In "Story Line", Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud
The Brief History of the Dead The Brief History of the Dead The Brief History of the Dead is a fantasy and adventure novel by Kevin Brockmeier. The story takes place in two realms concurrently in the middle of the 21st century: On earth in the United States and Antarctica, and in a place beyond death called The City. The people in The City are there only as long as someone who remembers them is still alive on earth. They arrive, usually with the realization that they have died, and become members of the community there in ways similar to when they were alive. The City