Big I, Eye, Aye.

Thesis: The greatest Hell to humanity is the complete absence of reason and meaning. (meaninglessness and nothingness). OR, The greatest Hell imaginable is a world absent of meaningful (and reasonable?) input.

Progression, more formally typed: (I might switch the psycho. and philo. sections)

Examples from book
- Actual representation of Hell
- How certain characters interpret it (Carys VS Whitehead VS Marty)

Philosophical Outlook and how it relates in book
- Being VS Nothingness
- Meaning VS Meaninglessness (Nihilism)
included above: Dread.

Scientific/psychological/historical? backup, how it relates to book
- Solitary confinement
- No sound in room experiment
- Voids considered heretical in middle ages

Ramble-y bits start here:

(- When Marty is in Hell
         – How Carys goes into Hell herself… why she likes it. Sartrean freedom?
- Contrast with images of Warsaw etc.. ? 

- PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(existential)

Theory of Nihilism? Meaning VS Meaninglessness (go into different theories of meaning. Ultimate meaning especially http://www.existential-therapy.com/Special_Topics/Meaning.htm)

Being and Nothingness – Sartre. Read more.

http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/nothingness/

CONSIDER DREAD. “Carefully contemplating Nothing in itself, we begin to notice the importance and vitality of our own moods. Above all else, Nothing is what produces in us a feeling of dread {Ger. Angst}. This deep feeling of dread, Heidegger held, is the most fundamental human clue to the nature and reality of Nothing. ” http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/7b.htm#nothing/)

Huge pile of examples here, quotes I’m considering from book:

“No need to go, he thought; nothing to lose if I stay here and the grey comes again.” (387)

“He had fallen to his knees; what was left of his self-presrevation was a tattered and hopeless thought, grey on grey. Even the voice had stopped now. It was bored with the banter. Besides, it had taught its lesson well. Nothing is essential, it had said, and shown him the why and how; or rather dug up that part of him that had known all along. Now he would would just wait for the progenitor of this elegant syllogism to come and despatch him. He lay down, not certain if he was alive or dead, if the man who would presently come would kill him or resurrect him: only certain that to lie down was easiest, in this, the emptiest of all worlds.” (383)

“Arms spread before him like a blind man on a cliff-edge, he reeled, looking for some point of security. his wasn’t the adventure he’d thought it would be; it was nothing. Nothing is essential. Once stepped into, this boundlessness nowhere had neither distance nor depth, north nor south. And everything outside it – the stairs, the landing, the stairs below that, the hallway, Carys – all of it was like a fabrication. A dream of palpability, not a true place. There was no true place but here. All he’d lived and experienced, all he’d taken joy in, taken pain in, it was insubstantial. Passion was dust. Optimism, self-deception. He doubted now even the momory of senses: the textures, the temperatures. Colour, form, pattern. All diversions – games the mind had invented to disguise this unbearable zero. And why not? Looking too long into the abyss would madden a man.” (381)

—> Look into that experiment with rooms with absolutely no noise, how that affected the person.

—> Look into effects of complete solitude on inmates and such. Interesting that Marty was in jail, yet he was still terrified of the void.

“Hell is the place of those who have denied;
They find there what they planted and what dug,
A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing,
And wander there and drift, and never cease
Wailing for substance.”
-W.B. Yeats, The Hour Glass

- How Warsaw in the beginning would usually be considered a Hell, but to Whitehead it is not, because there is so much input, even if it is really terrible. (contrast to actual Hell)

“I can bear the night itself. It’s not pleasant, but it’s not unambiguous. It’s twilight I can’t deal wtih. That’s when the bad sweats come over me. When the light’s going and nothing’s quite real anymore, quite solid. Just forms. Things that once had shapes…
It had been winter of such evenings: colourless drizzles that eroded distance and killed sound; weeks on end of uncertain light, when troubled dawn became troubled dusk with no day intervening.” (57)

“She found it difficult to recall her nightmares of nullity; his presence cancelled memory.” (237) Before talks about white tree and dead people illusion. Go into that, the importance of WHITE.

“There is no Hell, the old man thought, putting the boudoir and its charred Casanove out of his mind. Or else Hell is a room and a bed and appetite everlasting, and I’ve been there and seen its rapture and, if the worst comes to the worst, I will endure it.” (336)

“She wasn’t prone to believing that the world was all in the mind. That’s why she’d gone to H: the world was too real. Now here was this vapour in her ears, telling her she was nothing, everything was nothing; nameless muck.” (384)

[Lovely concluding paragraph will be found here.]

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