Running With Scissors

The Pen is Pointier Than The Sword

The concept of Hell is, for most people, a deeply abstract concept that is almost impossible to grasp once you really try to think about it.

Is there fire in hell? What if I'm an arsonist and I like fire? Is there ice in hell? Do they really use pitchforks to torture us? And will there be Wi-Fi? Is hell Wi-Fi like, super good, but you have to purchase something to get the password? And are freshly pulled teeth hell's currency? That last one is very important to know.

But let's start with the basics: just what is this hell thing everyone is talking about? A question that nobody really seems to have a definitive answer to, in part because the idea of what hell actually consists of is depends on the person.

For Christians, hell is a place of eternal punishment for unrepentant sinners. While not many specifics have been given, pain and fire are usually associated with it. But what if, say, you're a masochist who is really into pain? Suffering would be heaven for you, you sick weirdo.

There's no such thing as hell in Judaism, but a sort of afterlife waiting room, which, since it doesn't have any interesting magazines, can also constitute as a sort of hell. For the Technopaths of Jebulon IX, hell is a place where you always have one signal bar flickering on and off and have to constantly move around to try and get it to send a really important email.

To account for the serious lack of consistency between major religions, authors everywhere have tried to portray a more accessible version of hell with less mysticism and more people getting stabbed.

Dante Alighieri had perhaps one of the most visceral accounts of hell to date in his "Divine Comedy," a story that, if you ask us, severely lacks in fart jokes. In it, Dante actually maps hell as several concentric rings, with souls being cast to any of them depending on the cardinal sin they were associated with.

He goes into great detail to describe the different kinds of torture people receive when they arrive, which mostly make sense, but he also says he got there by being chased by a lion, a tiger, and a female werewolf. We don't have any evidence that Dante was a furry, but we don't have any doubts, either. As such, his opinion will be discarded.

Perhaps there's no better description of hell that the one French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre gave in his play "No Exit," wherein three people are sent to hell, only to find no fire or pitchforks, but a very cozy room decorated in the style of the French Second Empire. The three are locked in there for all eternity, inadvertently torturing each other again and again.

It was this play that gave birth to Sartre's most infamous and often misquoted line: "Hell is other people."

Of course, what he meant by that is the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object from the view of another consciousness, but that doesn't stop edgy teenagers from putting it on t-shirts to prove how unique they are. Most popularly, it is understood to be an acclamation that there's no bigger torture than to coexist with another human being.

Peter Katz would gladly agree with that remark—if ever cared to read Sartre, which he didn't—but he would make a small adjustment to it.

For him, hell was other people who questioned his taste in movies.

"I'm not saying it's a bad movie per see," said the man sitting across the aisle from Peter in the suicide bus, "I'm just saying it doesn't make any sense that old Biff was able to return to the future after giving the almanac to himself in 1955. Doc explains it when they go back to the alternate present."

"Nobody asked for your fucking opinion, Richard," said Peter, burying deeper on his seat.

"You have to admit it's a bit odd they missed that," said an old woman sitting in front of Peter.