l'enfer, c'est nous (hell is us)

unbearable lightness / burdensome weight

an interesting observation from Zach's blog:

I think it's a very sad fact of the human condition that we cannot conceptualize a state of being in which we would enjoy living forever. Our existence is fundamentally flawed - paradoxically, we are terrified of both death and eternal life.

... which in my mind touches upon some points made in C.S. Lewis passages (and the thesis of his book The Great Divorce):

"Christianity asserts we are all going to on forever, and this must either be true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse so gradually that the increase in my lifetime will not be very noticeable- but it might be absolute hell in a million years- in fact, if Christianity is true, hell is the precisely correct technical term for it... Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, alwyas blaming others... but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God 'sending us' to hell. In each of us, there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

"Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put seecond to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself."

Perhaps Jean Paul Sartre is in part right: "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people). Except that, hell isn't just other people- it is us.*

*Or perhaps, more correctly, it is in us.