More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.
We have all scattered far and wide into the vastness of this space and cannot find one another. I suspect by now we are all alone.
“Satan?” One of the women whispered hoarsely. “Ahriman? No, no, no. Nothing as notable as that. I am Xandern. One of the Yazatas. A minor functionary. I hope you are not too disappointed?”
“Help me, Jesus!” The Demon looked on quizzically. “You were a Christian then?” “Yes. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I shouldn’t be here. I’ve been saved,” the man shouted, though with waning bravado. “Well, there’s your problem. You didn’t join the one true religion.” “What? I’m telling you, I was a Christian. I read the Bible every day. I donated money to the TV evangelists every Sunday. And I was saved.” “No. Sorry. The true religion is Zoroastrianism, I’m afraid. Bit of bad luck there. Christianity certainly borrowed a great deal from the one true religion, but not enough,
...more
It’s crazy. Create a few beings; those that don’t obey you roast forever?
Ahriman has rebelled against God, but in charge of Hell? Heavens, no. How can you think God would let something like Hell exist if He’s really in charge of the universe? Sheesh. Running a Hell is an art of such imagination and brilliance, how could anyone but the Wise God of Judgment be in charge?”
This Hell did not fit anywhere in my belief system.
Maybe God was a demon – that would explain much of the misery of earth life.
This Hell is based upon a short story by Jorge Luis Borges from your world called “The Library of Babel.”
We would ask that you please follow a few simple rules during your stay in Hell: 1. Please be kind. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Failure to do this will bring unhappiness and misery to you and your fellow citizens. 2. Do not get discouraged. Remember nothing lasts forever. Someday this will be a distant memory. 3. Please leave towels on the floor if you wish them to be cleaned. Hang up those you wish to use again. 4. Books not in your possession will be returned to their original place on the stacks every night. A book will be considered in your possession if you are touching
...more
This clarity of memory surprised me the first time I tried reviewing the past, but it was all there. (This was to be the greatest curse of Hell.
“Strange Hell,” he said, motioning to the people on the other side of the chasm. “Not what I expected,” I agreed. “Not Zoroastrian either then?” “Mormon.” “Ah. I was agnostic, so of course I wasn’t thinking of this as the final ending,” he said, waving his arm around randomly.
“imagine a library that contains not just every book that has been written, but every book that could be written. I remember the story exactly. How strange. But the basic idea from Borges’s story is that the library contains every possible book. So somewhere in here is a book of all A’s, a book of all periods, or a book of semicolons, or B’s. Any letter.
It was as if my neural wiring had been rewritten in accordance with a modified version of Descartes’s famous dictum, “I think therefore I am.” Now it was “I think I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
“I don’t know how to tell my life. It was sometimes a good life, sometimes it was not – mostly not.
My lust seemed to have disappeared as she became a real person and not just a red-headed object with a nice face.
Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult.
I looked at it a long while, enjoying the feel of the book’s weight and the deep satisfaction of finding an island of sensible text in an ocean of meaninglessness.
Why thank this God who has condemned us to an endless Hell? We are all slowly going crazy. And the task? We all know it’s impossible. A book on our life? There must be billions of such books. In what detail? From whose perspective? A book on every second of our life would take volumes. A book about my life from my own perspective would be very different from that of an observer who loved me, or from one who hated me. Which book is the right one?”
We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There’s no context for our lives. We’re all white, equal ciphers, instances of the same absurdity repeated over and over. We try to scratch some hope or meaning out of it with our university, but ultimately there is nothing to attach meaning to. We’re damned.”
There was no life here. Hell was a machine. Except us. Here, her hand in mine was the one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell.
But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.
Ages of universes pass while I look at books of nonsense, yet I think on and on of a love so far in the past it is incomprehensible to believe it was even real. What is love that it has such power? Whatever it is, it seems unlikely this God who placed me here knows anything about it. If it loved me in the least, could it inflict what it has upon me? Who can understand? Once I feared to say such things, dreading a worse punishment. But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it
...more
There is a despair that goes deeper than existence; it runs to the marrow of consciousness, to the seat of the soul. Could I keep living like this forever? How could I continue existing in this Hell? And yet there was no choice. Existence goes on and on here. Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.
Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.
The hope of a human relationship no longer carries any depth or weight for me, and all meaning has faded long ago into an endless grey nothingness. Now the search is all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains. A hope that somehow, something, God, the demon, Ahura Mazda, someone, will see I’m trying. I’m really trying, and that will be enough.
