My Afterlife

Shakespeare took a few shots at depicting a hellish afterlife. 

 

The most extended, if I remember correctly, belongs to Claudio in Measure for Measure.  "To die, and go we know not where;/ To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;/ This sensible warm motion to become/ A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit/ To bathe in fiery floods,/ Or to reside in thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;/ To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,/ And blown with restless violence round about/ The pendent world; or to be worse than worst/ Of those that lawless and incertain thought/ Imagine howling: tis too horrible." It's a damned scary vision, and mostly easy to understand, though it helps to be reminded that sensible= having sense, "delighted" = darkened, "thrilling"= piercing, "viewless" = blind, and that "lawless and incertain thought" refers to non-Christian speculation. Shakespeare gives Claudio a number of choices for eternal suffering, each one worse than the other.  

 

When Othello realizes that Desdemona was innocent after all, he foresees a one-dimensional hot hell, one in which devils will "Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulfur/ Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire." Clear enough, painful enough.

 

And finally, Lear imagines himself "Bound upon a wheel of fire,/ That mine own tears to scald like molten lead." 

 

I think the whole afterlife thing is a fraud, but if there were a hell, here's what mine would be like.

 

I'm on a commercial flight, steerage class, cramped into a seat too narrow and lacking adequate leg room. A middle seat. On my left is a very large gentleman whose massive shoulders and thighs encroach upon my territory. He stinks of tobacco. He drinks too much alcohol and tries to engage me in conversation. On my right is a similarly-proportioned lady who reeks of cheap perfume and who glares at me whenever my bony elbow makes contact with her fat forearm. I'm hungry and all there is to eat are some horrid plastic pretzels in a bag that only a safecracker could open. A scruffy fourteen-year-old boy sits behind me. Rap "music" leaks from his earbuds and he kicks the back of my seat at irregular intervals. My only reading matter is a airline magazine that advertises expensive gimcrack novelties that no sensible human would ever dream of buying. My bladder is distended and painful but the seat-belt sign is perpetually lit. This plane never lands. Sometimes it threatens to do so, but at the last moment it's diverted to another airport.

 

This continues throughout all eternity.

 

And it is much worse than vats of liquid fire. Far worse than anything that Shakespeare could possibly have imagined.

Comments

[Stefanie Van Pelt]

At least you don't have to be scared the plane will crash. You will be HOPING it crashes!

[Christopher Kyrle]

At least it's expensive.