A Short Stay in Hell

A great work of philosophy and imagination, this slim novel takes a simple premise and allows us to ponder the nature of existence from various angles.

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A man dies and is sent to a very specific Hell that is set in a library so vast there seems no end to the shelves above, below and to the left and right. Every book that could ever be written (with the Roman alphabet) is there - even ones that use a single letter repeatedly throughout the book, or a letter soup of random characters.

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To get out of this Hell, one only has to find the book that contains one’s life story. To come across even a simple string of words that make sense within a book is a rare find that is shared, cried over, and revered among others who roam the library.

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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.

The work entertained the notion that evolution was the most effective sorting algorithm for finding the subsets of coherent and readable books that are scattered thinly throughout the randomness of the library.

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The protagonist lives for billions of years within the library without hope of ever leaving it. Is that what Hell is? Or is it the uniformity of only meeting other white Americans? Of having the lights turn off at 10pm and turn on again at 6am every day without variation? Is it always being in view of a large clock, and never being able to forget any detail of your previous life or your stay in Hell? Is it the sameness of the book bindings, the unvarying organization of each floor of the library, and the monotony of the grey carpet everywhere?

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It seems odd to me now that after so long I still focus on a time so brief as to be but a fraction of an instant in the time I will be here, but so powerfully has that instant rooted into me that I hold onto it with a hopeless desperation. Ages of universes pass while I look at books of nonsense, yet I think on and on of a love so far in the past it is incomprehensible to believe it was even real. What is love that it has such power?

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The ideas put forth in this are humorous, heart-breaking, thought-provoking, and beautiful. At just over a hundred pages, it is absolutely worth sitting down with it for an afternoon. 100% recommended.

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