Gustave Doré, Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell
Hell seems somewhat to have burnt itself out over the last half century or so. What do I mean by this? That the idea of eternal punishment — transcendent torture, to put it bluntly — can hardly be maintained. It would be utterly barbaric and totally pointless. For the worst crimes, life imprisonment is quite sufficient. People who have murdered, and have been interviewed after x years in prison, can never get themselves to describe the actual moment of the crime; and warders report that youths who have knifed someone to death sob into their pillows every night... Things are seldom as we think they might be.
There is no hell — except on earth. But if we just consider it for a moment — in orthodox terms, and as a thought experiment — then we see that, if hell is discarded there is a problem as to the destination of those who do not ‘qualify’ for heaven. Perhaps we could say that the latter simply do not survive death. But then the difference is as all or nothing! There is of course no answer to any of this; nothing to go on; no reports; nothing but a collection of highly obscure ancient texts, written by we know not whom, and subsequently spun in to subtle thought–webs by such thinkers as Aquinas and Augustine. That these men were great thinkers there is no question: they were among the greatest, and their addition to the sum of thought can hardly be overestimated. However, on the topic here under consideration, they were as absolutely ignorant as you or me. ‘The journey is safer for the map’, says Emerson. And so it is, but we have no map for an afterlife, and my guess is that there is no territory to be mapped. There is, however, something very familiar to us: a cloud of unknowing — a permanent feature of the landscape of our inner being!
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The ‘red top’ newspapers are quite fond of hell — as a suitable place for certain murderers and sex offenders. ROT IN HELL! is a very popular headline. Strange use of language here: no fire apparently, but some kind of dank dungeon in which the offender is always rotting. But if you have rotted you have died. Perhaps the idea is that you catch some respiratory disease from which you never recover, and from which you never die. However, this form of stasis is impossible. ‘I do not think that anyone can stand still for very long without going to seed’, says J B Priestley. Quite so. Also, there is a problem with rotting to death, only to be brought back to life to rot again — ad infinitum. The problem being? That, in the words of Lucretius, ‘if ever anything is so transformed as to overstep the limits of its own being, this means the death of what was before.’ For example, if a log is burnt to ashes it cannot be restored to its original form. Even if it was possible to create an exact replica of the original log it would not be the original log. This applies equally to human beings. So that a replicated ‘rot–ee’, brought back to life to rot again (ad infinitum), would not be the original person. Consequently the infinite number of ‘torturees’ would all be innocent victims! Worse, they would be monstrous blanks, possessing brains stripped of all memory. The stuff, in other words, of complete nightmare.
The ‘red top’ newspapers were originally called tabloids. This distinguished them from the serious newspapers, the format of which was ‘broadsheet’. However, this useful distinction ceased to apply when the broadsheets began to adopt tabloid format — with the exception of the Guardian, which adopted the mid–way Berliner Format, and the Telegraph which remains broadsheet (and conservative to the last!). There are, however, two other tabloid newspapers in the UK: the Mail and the Express. The content of these newspapers is designed specifically for ‘Middle England’ readers, and they tell them exactly what they want to hear! Ah, is there anything like the bolstered prejudice to harden the heart or turn it gooey with ersatz emotion! However, in discussing the ‘red tops’ — essentially aimed at what used to be called the working class(es), but which may now be ‘de–classified’ and simply described as manual workers — I'm reminded of three things observed over the past several decades. First, nobody who does not regard themselves as at least lower middle class uses an umbrella. Second, it used to be the habit of labourers to stuff folded tabloids into their jacket pockets — half the newspaper sticking out at a casual angle. And third, the tabloid / ‘red top’ has now supplanted the once ubiquitous cap as a means of keeping heads dry in the rain. I doubt they were ever put to better use!
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