“If you get too famous you will go straight to hell,” a Japanese Zen master had warned a group Phædrus was in. It had sounded like one of those Zen “truths” that don’t make any sense. Now it was making sense. He wasn’t talking about anything Dante would have identified. Dante’s Christian hell is an afterlife of eternal torment, but Zen hell is this world right here and now, in which you see life around you but can’t participate in it. You’re forever a stranger from your own life because there’s something in your life that holds you back. You see others bathing in the life all around them while
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