Reflections on Hell
Hell is, I think, not a particularly attractive place. Yes, there’s something in human beings that longs for God, but there’s also something that longs to be rid of him, like taking out the surveillance cameras—and in Hell you can do so. The fact is, you can actually do okay down there, once you learn how it works, and resign yourself to a constant struggle to protect your stuff. As in earthly life, people gather in bars and talk about how meaningless everything is—only there, it really is. And you realize that meaninglessness is, take it all around, not that bad—in fact, better than being trapped with meaningful people on earth who talk only about money, status, consumption, “them,” and football—a royal flush of the dullest topics known to man. Thank God they all go to their own gated Heaven.
Some people in Hell figure there have got to be better Heavens than that, and toy with envisioning them and imagining “good”—but nobody really buys it. “Good” is like an unstable particle—never makes it enough past possibility to really be a part of the show. Plus—for eternity? What a sick idea. What in the hell are you going to do with all this eternity? It’s just not right. There you are, with all this time stretching out before you when it was time itself you most longed to escape. The fact is, eternity is not an endless horizontal endurance of time; it is vertical, inherent in everything that is. We think time and space are absolutes waiting for shit to happen in them, rather than the byproducts of the shit happening itself—then when the shit is happening, tailored to that particular shit and not even non-existent when not, because that makes non-existent sound like the opposite of existent, which it’s not, because it’s not anything, even if that sounds like the opposite of something. It’s only there when needed. It’s a sad truth that we really can’t know anything about nothing because we turn it into something by trying.
And nothing is our salvation. What they thirst for in Hell.
January 23, 2019