James Joyce
Made Me Loss My Religion
Long Beach Island, NJ
Summer 1975
I am sitting on the beach on
a hot, hot summer afternoon. I have to
be careful because the sun tends to burn my skin quickly. If I am not careful,
I will blister and suffer days of heat exhaustion. The curse of Irish skin.
I am alone and reading James
Joyce, Portrait of An Artist As A Young
Man. He begins to describe hell and his description is so repulsive, I have
to stop reading. Does he believe this to be true? Is this really what hell is like? Does a place like this really exist? And what about the all forgiving part of
God. This doesn’t sound at all
forgiving. Maybe hell is just made up to
control us, to scare us into doing the right thing? How does anyone really know if there is a
hell or not? It’s only a speculation at
this point. What is ahead of me in the next life? I don’t have any of these answers but I do
know that this day was the day all of my Catholic education began to erode into
skepticism and doubt.
“The horror of this
strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the
world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to
a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged
the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity
fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned
themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says,
one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this
world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long
enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine
some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave,
a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames,
devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of
nauseous loathsome decomposition. And 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. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the
horror of the stench of hell.”
or bkmemoirs.wordpress.com
