A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? 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. So tricky to untangle. I still remember the deep sense of loss. The pain almost killed me.

The way Soren choses to live his life in the face of this crisis stands in stark contrast to the Direites, who choose a much less compassionate path. Having an external system as a supporting structure at least gives a society something to hew to, flawed as it may be.

“I remember when I first got here, I was a vegetarian deeply committed to eating low on the food chain. When I was alive, I didn’t want to be part of the industrial food complex with its abject animal cruelty. Then one day someone watching me eat said, ‘What, do you think there’s some Hell somewhere in the larger universe where people are running a chicken factory? Another where they make these meals for the kiosk and send them here on some sort of conveyer belt?’ The absurdity of it has never left me. 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.”

Homogeneity everywhere, endlessly stretching into an eternity of monotony.