Sunday, October 16, 2011
Infernal Obsolescence
This is an interesting piece by J. Peter Nixon about how traditional views of hell are increasingly seen as tiresome, motivationally inefficacious, and generally outré. The story neglects an important piece of the banalization of hell, of course. From Sartre's No Exit -- as you remember, the scene is a drawing room decorated in Second Empire furnishings (which I've always kind of liked, though to Sartre's modernist taste, it looked "rather like a dentist's waiting room") in which three people are trapped with nothing but each other:
Garcin: Will night never come?
Inez: Never.
Garcin: You will always see me?
Inez: Always.
Garcin: This bronze. Yes, now's the moment; I'm looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I'm in hell. I tell you, everything's been thought out beforehand. They knew I'd stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old-wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is -- other people!
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/10/infernal-obsolescence.html
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Thank you, Marc. About a quarter century ago, the popular and insightful television show "Saint Elsewhere" offered another take on what is hell. In one episode, one of the young doctors was shot by an assailant in the emergency room. As he drifts between life and death, the doctor-victim has a taste of heaven and hell. Heaven is something of the eternal banquet, or in this episode, garden party where the doctor enjoys the company of all he knew and loved. Hell, well, it's just the opposite. There is no one. He is isolated, sitting in a little boat on a dead lake in the midst of a desert. All is baren; there is no companionship; there is no one to share the eternal isolation. But the doctor is eventually brought back to the existence of life by his dedicated colleagues in the emeregency room, and, at least for a while, his experiences of eternal companionship and eternal loneliness linger with him. But here, hell is not other people; rather, it is isolation from them.
RJA sj