Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

Alice rolled her eyes. “Please don’t insinuate I’m not clever enough to go to Hell.”

Most baffling of all is the question of punishment. What purpose does it serve? Is it rehabilitative—must we only suffer until we’ve learned our lessons? Is it retributive—must we balance the karmic scales, lose an eye for an eye, and suffer as much as the suffering we wrought? How many hours in pits of boiling water balance out a murder? Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?

And classical logic especially falls apart as a language applied to human relationships, which are messy and complicated and often situated in that excluded middle; that space where no one is right and no one is wrong and things are neither true nor false.

All this time, thought Alice. All this time they’d both been drowning, and thinking the other was gloating at them from the shore.

A staircase materialized before them, spiraling outward with the sound of a rushing stream. Up and up it went until they lost sight of its end, a needle through the world. Hand in hand, Alice and Peter approached its base. “Go on,” said Lord Yama. “Be careful you do not look back.” “Really?” asked Alice. “I’m only joking,” said Lord Yama. “Look however much you want. Go on.”