The Economist’s Inferno

Leave it to the venerable Economist to continue to scoop the Internet through sheer ingenuity. Who but The Economist would run a cover story on entitled  “A Rough Guide to Hell,” in its year-end double issue (December 22-January 4). The story is full of wonderful facts and locutions. We learn that “Hell has many mansions. Hinduism has 22 main hells…Sinhalese Buddhism has 136 and Burmese Buddhism 40040, one for each particular sin—including noisiness, chicken selling and eating sweets with rice.” And the torture is increased since “the fire of Hell…did not consume what it burned.” And since the soul was immortal there was no escape.” Within the cartography provided— in a piece that analyzes hell with all the journalistic acuity that The Economist might devote to Greece’s economic problems (another hell)— are some memorable locutions. “Hell itself seemed poised uneasily on the very edge of time. Milton, like Hesiod thought that all beginnings and all ends contended just beyond Hellgate, and that night and day met there.” When Descartes “declared that the soul was immaterial," he drove a spike in Hell’s heart and though it doesn’t quite go so far as Sartre’s, “hell is other people,” the article which actually functions for its reader like Virgil did for Dante, leaves us on the verge of modernity quoting Milton “The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” and Blake “Hell is being shut up in the possession of corporeal desires.” “A Rough Guide to Hell” is investigative journalism at its highest or shall we say lowest level.

His Dark Materials

The Times ran a piece about the search for dark matter (NYT, 12/18/09), the mysterious element that scientists believe may constitute the building blocks of the universe. Producing temperatures of one hundredth of a degree Kelvin—near absolute zero—at the bottom of an abandoned copper mine in Minnesota, a team of scientists that identifies itself as the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search have come tantalizingly close to identifying the residues of the kinds of energy they are looking for. Of course, readers of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Milton’s Paradise Lost, upon which Pullman’s enormously popular trilogy is based, will be heartened by research that reveals the scientific underpinnings for what previously seemed to be mere poetic conjecture.

  

These revelations come not through looking into a telescope, but in effect from creating an environment devoid of cosmic radiation, which can obfuscate the detections of this dark Miltonian world. And what is both compelling and disturbing about the findings is the fact that the universe is expanding.  According to the Times piece, dark matter could constitute the missing piece of a puzzle that includes 4% atoms and 70% dark energy, which, the Times explained, has nothing to do with dark matter, which itself would account for the rest. What the future holds is not the prospect of overcrowding, but of tremendous isolation. If our search for life forms—another recent Times story described the discovery of a sultry, water-covered planet orbiting a distant star—is frustrated by the enormous distances involved in intergalactic travel, it will only get worse in eons to come.  But one thing is for sure: we are unlikely to be plagued by turf wars. By the time one settler is ready to homestead on  a far-off rancher’s lands, the rancher will be long dead.