Like every mortal, I often catch myself thinking about death. At times I wonder if I don’t more than most, but there’s no way to know for sure. It’s a frightening idea, and for Christians especially, because Hell always comes into the conversation. Hell is rather a poltergeist sort of terror—we assume it’s the worst thing imaginable because… Well, it’s Hell. I happened to be having one such conversation with a group of friends earlier this week, right in the middle of one of my anxieties about the Afterlife. “I think death is so frightening because it would be so boring. It’s very much a, ‘Well, I suppose that’s all’ sort of thing,” one offered.
I blinked. “I find it rather terrifying, to be honest. I’m not worried in the least about being bored. Hell is always a serious possibility.”
“But maybe Hell is scary because it would be so boring,” another said.
I was taken back to my first year in college where, lazily browsing a bookstore in Georgetown, I picked up Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. Flipping through, I found it to be totally useless. There were a few good lines—”You will stay a hyena, etc…,” shouts the demon who once crowned me with such pretty poppies—but it seemed to me this Rimbaud wasn’t taking Hell very seriously at all. ‘Yes, well,’ you say, ‘Rimbaud wasn’t exactly Mother Theresa.’ All right. But are Rimbaud and I even talking about the same thing? He sounds like he’d be up there with my university friends, as though the most horrible thing he can really imagine is being bored—having nothing to flaunt, no rules to break, no locked doors to barge through. Which leads me to wonder: can someone be that pathologically afraid of boredom, or do they just have no idea what eternal and unimaginable suffering would be like?
This brought me back another year prior—the year I thought I began to understand what Hell was.
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