There are two kinds of devilry in this world: the kind that froths and foams in the convent, and the kind that wears a signet ring and drafts policy. Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun is about both — a tale where hysteria kneels before power and calls it holy. I’ve long thought that if Lucifer … Continue reading The Devils of Loudun: Possession in the Age of Reasonable Madness
Tag: existential
The Forest That Feels: On Doré’s Inferno and the Suicide of the Soul
Gustave Doré, Inferno, Canto XIII: The Forest of Suicides, 1866.Wood engraving for Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (public domain image). When I first looked at Doré’s Forest of Suicides, I thought of winter trees after a storm - those half-living skeletons that creak when the wind passes through, as if remembering they were once alive. … Continue reading The Forest That Feels: On Doré’s Inferno and the Suicide of the Soul
The Trial of God – Faith, Silence, and the Prosecution of Heaven
The Trial of God is a courtroom drama in which the accused is the Almighty Himself, and the charge is silence. It’s not merely literature, but an act of theological rebellion, a Job rewritten for the smoke-stained century. Elie Wiesel, who survived the unspeakable and somehow found words anyway, didn’t write this work to comfort. … Continue reading The Trial of God – Faith, Silence, and the Prosecution of Heaven
No Exit – Hell, Mirrors, and the Modern Soul
No Exit is Sartre’s vision of the afterlife and contains no fire, no pitchforks, and no sulphuric pits; it is, instead, a perfectly reasonable room - which is precisely what makes it horrifying. He replaces Dante’s inferno with a waiting room furnished by IKEA and irony. This isn’t the Hell of theology but of psychology … Continue reading No Exit – Hell, Mirrors, and the Modern Soul
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Some novels are so steeped in fatalism that one half expects the pages to sigh when turned. The Mayor of Casterbridge is such a book - a work that feels as though it were written not with pen and ink, but with plough and sorrow. It’s a tragedy of the English soil, where destiny is … Continue reading The Mayor of Casterbridge
Wording 