This novella, by Steven L. Peck, scared me more than any other story I've read. The magnitude of eternity was laid bare in a way that made the incomprehensible understandable, if for just a moment.
Our minds are not built for scale. Humanity did not evolve to understand numbers and figures larger than the intuitive amounts that the first homo-sapiens 12,000 years ago needed to begin civilization. Civilization grew, but our minds have not expanded much beyond that moment. Base ten thinking from counting our figures, and simple math of easily digestible numbers and sizes. We can understand that the speed of light is 312,000 miles per hour, but we cannot intuit it. you read that number and "get it" but you cannot feel it. I cannot feel it. Our minds were not made for figures or speed of that scale.
Eternity is no different.
Life beyond this life is a tenant of so many religions and faiths of humanity. Life everlasting for the soul. Life in paradise, forever. These are good things, sold to us by many, yearned for by more. but what is eternity truly? What does life feel like after your hundredth or thousandth or billionth year?
A Short Stay in Hell shows eternity better than I've ever had to visualize it, better than I think I ever wanted to.
This book is not scary in the usual horror sense. Our protagonist is indeed dead, and sent to hell for following the wrong faith, but it is not a permanent stay. He only has to stay as long as it takes him to find a book biographing his life in a library filled with every book that could have ever been written. Every single book possible, in random organizations of characters as well as real words and sentences. He is not alone in this library hell, there are others on the same mission, to find their own biographies.
Every book that could have been written. The scale is incomprehensible, but Steven L. Peck makes it so. Slowly with our protagonist, we understand the scale of the library and the sheer number of books. We understand that time, though not an issue of mortality, is an issue because lack of it. Eons of searching pass. Lifetimes are lived in this library. We watch it pass in horror as the feeling dawns on our hero as it dawns on ourselves: Eternity anywhere is too long a time. Eternity is terrifying. Humanity was not meant for forever.
I read this novella in two sittings, and have pondered it for many more. The book stays in your mind. It haunts me still, months after reading it for the first time, but the knowing of eternity that it instills has faded somewhat. What was once without understanding has become so again, and so I must reread this book.
The writing lesson here is through Peck's development of the concept, so perfectly laid out and revealed, that there is little terror at what happens in hell, but rather the amount of time spent there, time beyond time. The construction of a story to explain an idea and a fear.
It is wonderful as it terrifies me.
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Love ya!
Max