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
Voices in the Earth of the planet he proceeds to play an old CD player. As Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 begins, Knowles is confronted by ghosts of the planet. He finds them in an abandoned café where they ask him not to forget their existence. Knowles pleads with Carlyle not to strip the planet but she insists upon it anyway. Knowles soon discovers that the ghosts are spirits of the forefathers who had not left the Earth when life began dissolving. They believe that humans are coming back to repopulate the planet, but Knowles explains why they are really there. He tries