A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

How do you pray if you don’t know what God is like?

Maybe God was a demon – that would explain much of the misery of earth life. Would prayer do any good? I could not tell.

Lastly, you are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.

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. Sometimes I would replay my entire life again and again for thousands of years. Remembering all the things I could have done differently, all the things … no. I won’t go there now. I must tell this story.)

War and Peace

I think therefore I am.”

On and on, from one day to another, I ran.

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?

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. “It does bring a modicum of hope.” “Yes, it does … and maybe some despair.”

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?”

In the morning we were still falling.

It was a strange feeling, falling for so long. The wind roared in my ears, but there was a peace to it, a relaxing sense of freedom I’d never known before. I was enjoying it, I had to admit. Enjoying it immensely. New experiences in Hell were few and far between, and I was having a ball.

What can you be afraid of if you're not able to die and time lasts forever

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.

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 is forever out of reach? Forever hidden?

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.

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.