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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorrie coey who wrote (10451)	1/28/2000 1:58:00 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Actually, "...take back the Oval Office" were the reviewer's words. But never mind that. The most vivid description of Hell comes from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen Dedalus is listening to a lecture by one of the good Fathers on Death, Judgement, and Hell. The description of Hell goes on for several pages. Here is a sample: ..."the walls of Hell are said to be four thousand miles thick, and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that...they are not even able to remove from the eye the worm that gnaws it...the horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench...all the offal and scum of the world shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer...imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption...then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus...and you will have some idea of the horror and stench of hell...Last and crowning tortures of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word...What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? For all eternity!...Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains!...Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness: and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun." It goes on like that for about 20 pages or so. I didn't include the most vivid language! I skipped over the punishment stuff and much other color. Joyce insisted that this part of the book was taken almost verbatim from one of his classes. I think he embellished just a little bit.