{"id":85138,"date":"2019-10-01T16:18:08","date_gmt":"2019-10-01T20:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=85138"},"modified":"2019-10-02T07:42:57","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T11:42:57","slug":"lq-henry-freedland-hell-breaks-loose-searching-for-hope-in-a-blazing-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=85138","title":{"rendered":"(LQ) Henry Freedland–Hell Breaks Loose: Searching for hope in a blazing world."},"content":{"rendered":"

Around the turn of the eighth century, a sickly Anglo-Saxon monk known as Dryhthelm died in the early hours of a Northumbrian evening. Through the night his household mourned his passing. Then at dawn, as the sun returned, so did Dryhthelm, who sat up in bed with a start. All fled the undead man but his wife; she stayed, trembling in fright. \u201cDo not fear,\u201d he said. \u201cI have been permitted to live among humankind once more,\u201d and he told her what he had seen.<\/p>\n

The journey in fleeting death had taken Dryhthelm down to a valley without end, one side of which was \u201cterrifying with raging flames,\u201d the other \u201cequally intolerable owing to fierce hail and cold blasts of snow gusting and blowing away everything in sight.\u201d Everywhere were \u201cpoor souls\u201d who attempted to escape the intense heat by leaping into the cold and then, finding no respite, launched themselves back into the high flames to burn again. Surveying the \u201ctorture of this alternating misery,\u201d Dryhthelm took the bilateral terror to be hell; he knew of its promised torment, its eternally unhappy agony. But his guide corrected the assumption: \u201cDo not believe this, for this is not the hell you are thinking of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dryhthelm was shaken\u2014how could things be worse? Still farther he was led, to where the landscape grew gloomier, the covering sky even more eaten by darkness, where flames came spurting from a pit with a vile stench. He stood, \u201cunsure what I should do or which way to turn,\u201d unable to differentiate between the \u201cwretched wailing\u201d of souls and a \u201craucous laughter, as though some illiterate rabble was hurling insults at enemies they had captured.\u201d Here it was at last: the infernal gloom, the precipice of damnation, the cries of suffering wretches, all the sorrowful punishments wielded by mindless, remorseless, contemptible hordes. Finally, the mouth of hell.<\/p>\n

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Dryhthelm\u2019s story was recorded by his contemporary the Venerable Bede in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People<\/em>. It is among the harrowing selections of the 2018 anthology The Penguin Book of Hell<\/em>. Historian Scott G. Bruce, who collected the texts, gently proposes in his introduction that \u201cthe political calamities of the modern world have increased the currency of the concept of hell as a metaphor for torment and suffering.\u201d From the \u201csulfurous and dark\u201d mountain envisioned by the medieval Irish knight Tundale to the Nazi death camp Treblinka\u2014about which the Russian writer Vasily Grossman<\/a> commented that \u201cnot even Dante, in his<\/em> hell, saw scenes like this\u201d\u2014the book traffics heavily in such horrid currency.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Hell Breaks Loose | Henry Freedland https:\/\/t.co\/mEFt80l1Ky<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Djelloul Marbrook (@DelMarbrook) July 1, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n