12:34 5-6-7

[mothman]

And why not? Pity about the seconds though. . .

[Emma Raducanu]

Wasn't the world meant to end or something

[mothman]

Perhaps it's the Rapture. In which case I've been Left Behind! Woohoo!

[Oscar]

Right then, quick name check. Who's not been taken? Dirty dirty sinners. Neil? Mrs Trousers? Aubrey? Shoulders? All still here. It'll be seven years of trumpets and tribulations.
How exciting

[Uncle TechTip]

End of the world? Phew, it's a good job nobody actually writes down the year as '7'

[Oscar]

Logic won't save you now. We're doomed, time to get used to it.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I feel fine.

[Oscar]

That's just the first stage, feeling fine lasts for a few hours, then the pustules start forming and your hands start to melt. And we should all hear the screams of a thousand thousand broken souls released from the dead soon. And the TV will stop working.

[mothman]

I love the line from Revelations: "And then there was silence in heaven for the space of about half an hour." There's a wonderful ad hoc-ness to it, a sort of "School Prize Day, to be held on the Cricket Green, inside if wet" feel to it.

[Melody Lee]

I was thinking about what hell could be like last night (whilst very relaxed) and imagined being on a plane, falling endlessly. Strapped into the seat, everyone screaming and being sick and all this going on for all eternity. Endless consciousness. It quite freaked me.

(Slightly off topic, but only slightly).

[Uncle TechTip]

After a while though you'd get used to it, surely. Now if the plane repeatedly slammed into the ground, that'd be fearsome. But I'm sure that after a few hours freefall you'd start to enjoy it.

[mothman]

I remember a SF short story, by Orson Scott Card I think, involving the electronic reading of people's brains and then transplanting it into cloned bodies (now a standard in SF, but it seemed quite a new idea when I first read it). The technology is then used to read someone's brain just as he dies, executed repeatedly in a variety of unpleasant and prolonged ways then re-incarnated to suffer again. In the end he gets used to it and the authroities stop it because he appears to be enjoying himself too much, making a show of the whole thing.

[Fry]

There was a fire in school today, I had to be taken out of my GCSE exams. That means something...right?



(seeing fireman blare down the street still never fails to excite me)

[purlieu]

After a while though you'd get used to it, surely.

I know this isn't the point you were making, but this is something I don't get about people's arguments against hell.  I often get "nah, you'd get used to it".  No, you wouldn't.  The idea of hell is eternal torment.  If you got used to it, it wouldn't be torment, so it wouldn't be happening - the torment would change.  Just the same way as people saying "heaven is perfect and would therefore be boring".  No.  It's perfect.  It cannot be boring, unless your idea of the perfect life is a boring one.  They're such simple concepts to grasp, yet people try and complicate them with utter silliness. 

[Still Not George]

Sartre explained in his notes on Le Huis Clos  (the source of the quote "Hell is other people", which is actually a misquote, but see later) that the essence of Hell was suffering in the absence of the capacity for change. The dead soul, as he saw it, had used its chances to develop and grow in the world and was bound to exist forever in its terminal state. This, for the sinful and broken, was therefore the reason for Hell; the goblins and monsters in the psyche would remain there, eternally tearing at the mind, and worst of all you would not be able to see another way to exist, as all of these problems come from the essentiality of your own persona - which, being dead, cannot develop and change with time.

That's why the quote "Hell is other people" is wrong - the character who pronounces it is unable to understand that the torment he faces comes from his inadequacy and his inability to deal with it. It's made clear at the end of the play, which I won't spoil too much just in case you ever go see the thing, but in short a means of escape from these "other people" is provided and none of the characters are able to take it. Not because they're prevented from doing so, but because that would involve them growing beyond what they are, which they cannot do, being dead.

All of this assumes you believe in an afterlife, of course, which I don't. I just find it fascinating.

[Emma Raducanu]

One can find death in many forms, like in a bird without wings or in a damp match or in a clock with no hour hand.

[Saygone]

.

Not because they're prevented from doing so, but because that would involve them growing beyond what they are, which they cannot do, being dead.

Do you know if Sartre ever resolved this?  What I mean is did he ever offer a way to resurrect oneself?

[Pseudopath]

.
Do you know if Sartre ever resolved this?  What I mean is did he ever offer a way to resurrect oneself?

As far as I'm aware, he's been dead since 1980, but I'm sure he'll figure it out soon.

[Still Not George]

Do you know if Sartre ever resolved this?  What I mean is did he ever offer a way to resurrect oneself?

No. Sartre intended Huis Clos as a counterpoint to L'etre et neant, his examination of life from an existentialist viewpoint. Sartre himself described the play as 'inexistentialisme", if that makes it any clearer. It's a kind of aversion or antinomian approach to hs earlier defences of the transcendentalism of conciousness (which I personally reject, btw - see my massive arguments with Ciaran and PK Duck on the topic) that helps clarify it.

But that's not why I like it; I just find the idea of a ceased-being that remains self-aware incredibly difficult and thus fascinating. Also it makes a great short play (having a massive 4 cast members in 1 room), and has a lesbian in it, which last has been proven to make everything better.