Mauricio Garcia Vega “Visita al infierno’ shared by artist under Creative Commons 3.0

“All those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE!” Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

What if the existentialists were wrong seeing in others eyes the mirror that condemns themselves?
That their self-directed focus loosed the bonds of the compassion experienced in community
Their desire to liberate themselves from the plight of humanity became their own chains
Which they forged like Marley in Dickens’ Christmas Carol when their neighbor no longer mattered
Their revelation became the great unseeing of their place within the covenant of the commonwealth
Where they looked at the unenlightened with disdain seeking to isolate themselves in their suffering
As they moved into the suburbs of hell to discover what one slowly but inexorably uncovers
That the mirror that condemns oneself is the looking glass of one’s own crafting they gaze into
Discovering in their loneliness that hell is a dungeon of one’s own mind that they are locked within
And the only key to salvation, though it goes against every practice they’ve embraced, every dogma
Is the other people they feared would see them as they are and would deem them unlovable

Perhaps they, like the denizens of C.S. Lewis’ vision, looked with disgust and moved themselves
Further and further away from the city, further away from the possibility of looking into another’s eye
As they move further and further into the wilderness to build their utopias in their grey worlds
Building the walls higher around their stately grounds along roads that no one travels
Locking themselves inside their places of paranoia and safety, hoarding their treasure like dragons
And still Amazon delivers to these unmapped places all the possessions which come to possess
Houses full of unopened boxes with smiles upon the side for people who no longer smile
“I think therefore I am” proclaimed their apostle Descartes as they declared the world outside false
No need for the flames of the lake of fire nor demonic torturers and devilish prison wardens
They in their own self-flagellation willingly wield the red-hot pokers unwilling to accept forgiveness
Remaining locked inside their self-imposed sentence of solitary confinement for unknown offenses