"I have to say I liked the idea of Limbo… for the vision it afforded
of Aristotle and the Buddha conversing with tiny, half-naked bushmen but
mostly, if I am honest, because I thought there might (unlike in Heaven)
be animals in that other world I had come to see as an endless expanse
of wide, sunwhitened meadow…

"More recent Hells belong to the world we live in day to day. At any
moment a character might enter into some mundane horror that goes on
forever according to its own inscrutable logic, a waking nightmare, a
quotidien madness. In Kafka and Gogol, for example, ordinary clerks
find themselves transformed into giant insects, or condemned in absentia
for a crime that is never named…

"For these writers hell is not a religious matter – it is existential.
As people gathered in cities and lost track of the natural rhythms of
life, a new age of dread was born, an age of dark satanic mills and the
death of God, an age of quiet desperation and the convoluted personal
infernos exposed by psychoanalysis. [gives quotes of syphilitic
hallucinations]

"Father Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov says, "I maintain that it
[hell] is the suffering of no longer being able to love". It is also,
perhaps, salutary to remember that, if Hell is others [Sartre], then the
Hell of others is me."

John Burnside in the Sunday Herald