Conventional wisdom (or at least wishful thinking) says that death is like being in a featureless white room forever, a sort of insensible nothing without beginning or end. It’s an idea built on the inductive proof of self: if you can (not) sense a world outside yourself, then there must (not) be a self that does the sensing. If you take this idea to its boring conclusion, you question your perceptions and ask, “What is the Matrix?” The Unfinished Swan asks something more interesting, “What if there is something there, and I just can’t see it?”