A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

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.

One book I found not long ago was full of random characters except for pages 111 to 222, wherein I found an exposition that speculated that God had created the universe as a way of sorting through the great library, finding those books that were most beautiful and meaningful.

Zoroastrianism,

The demon said God was called Ahura Mazda. Was he kind and loving? What was his nature? Was it even a he, like the God I’d worshiped all my life as a Mormon? Could it be a Goddess? I had no way to know. 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.

This Hell is based upon a short story by Jorge Luis Borges from your world called “The Library of Babel.”

(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.)

I took my first cup ever on this morning. Being a Mormon, I had never even tasted coffee, let alone drunk a whole cupful. How could that matter now? Zoroastrianism had been shown true, and I was in a Hell that had no prohibitions against it.

Sometimes I thought I could see it, but it never appeared, and really I could not see anything but a vanishing point far in the distance. Straight on the shelves ran until they disappeared into a tiny point that never changed, never gave a hint that I was approaching an end. For three weeks I ran, covering I estimate about fourteen hundred miles, and nothing ever changed.

“Great God, whose heaven we eagerly await. We are gathered here on the first day of the one hundred and second year of our time in Hell, to praise you and to honor your memory and presence. Bless these proceedings that we may find favor in your sight. That we may be led to our life stories.

I knew what despair she was talking about. This tiny nonsensical sentence was all that a group of over seventy-five people could show for a hundred years of effort.

“I don’t really doubt – I just want to. I think in part it’s the lack of diversity, the lack of nuance, like the veins of a leaf, or the grains in a piece of feldspar, the lack of variety and detail. I keep wondering about the idealist’s perspective that our minds are sitting in a jar somewhere and all this is just a projection of some sort.

solipsism

How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

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.”

Have you ever loved someone for a thousand years? I would have bet it impossible, but that’s how long we were together. A thousand years we traveled the halls of Hell together.

“So you’re from way up there. You fell for what, seven, maybe ten days. At over a hundred twenty miles an hour. You’ve really covered some distance. I’m envious. That’s over thirty thousand miles. Wow, and the top floor is higher than that. Who would have guessed?” I smiled. “I thought I would have hit the bottom before this, too.”

He opened the book to a page he had marked with a napkin and handed it to me. I was stunned. It read, Breath, comes to me in bursts of joy. Stones retched out bloody worms, worn red with the passing of licking patterns of salt. Why signal wu8&xxKJOPOlns;kkk; I’d never read anything of such profound clarity in the library before. Tears rolled down my face, and I looked up at him in gratitude. “Wonderful isn’t it?” he said. “It’s two sentences that are grammatically correct! They make sense. This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. It’s poetry.” I was wild with joy. I hugged the book and kissed its cover and passed it reverently, if somewhat reluctantly, back to him. “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve given me some hope I haven’t had in a long time.”

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.

In a place where there is no real death, I had seen pain, anger, hatred, viciousness, blazing insane malicious rage, boredom often, frustration commonly, love, joy, contentment, excitement, sorrow over lost love, and a host of other emotions, but not this. Not this kind of mourning. Such a striking combination of loss and unalloyed despair I had not seen since my life on earth.

“You have over a million more orders of magnitude light-years to fall than there were electrons in our old universe.”

Then came centuries of agonizing thought. I knew I had not even fallen a light-year yet. I had googols and googols of light-years to go. There is a despair that goes deeper than existence; it runs to the marrow of consciousness, to the seat of the soul.

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.