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What am I? What am I? Oh, I must, I must find an answer to this question, because another question hangs from it like a threat: What is to become of me?

There is no paradise other than what we ourselves take into the immense tombs of the churches. There is no hell other than our mad longing to live.



Heaven or hell? How do we decide it? What is the criterion for it? Whether we are living in one or we may enter to it after life. These are some basic questions which come to a typical mind when we think about ‘hell��. What we generally accept about these two extremes is: a state of bliss and/or an abode of deity or sacred reality on the one hand, and a state of spiritual impoverishment and/or an abode of evil or demonic spirits on the other. As a spatial referent, Heaven is generally considered to be "above," "higher" than the human or earthly plane. On the contrary, Hell is generally regarded as a realm "below," a meaning reflected in the derivation. Thus, Heaven is often symbolized by light or brightness as a realm of bliss, whereas Hell is characterized as dark or shadowy, a realm of anguish and suffering. But if we get heaven only in after life- as suggested by our generally accepted norms- then this life here itself becomes hell- hell of existence, what is the purpose of going through it to get heaven in nether world which we are not very sure. All these philosophical discussions seem to be futile, nothing can be checked, nothing can be proved to be true. After all, what is the meaning of truth? Our imagination seems to be better than reality; but can we live with imagination? Can we refute the reality? Is reality ‘Hell�� then?

We have the divinity of our immense misery; and our solitude, with its burden of thought, tears and smiles, is inevitably divine by virtue of its universality.. Whatever our anguish and effort in the dark, and the futile toil of our incessant heart, and our ignorance and destitution, and the hurts which are other people, we must consider ourselves with a sort of devout respect. It is this feeling which gilds our brows, uplifts our hearts, embellishes our pride, and will console us in spite of everything, when we have accustomed ourselves, in all our petty occupation, to take the place once held by God. Truth itself bestows an adequate gratification, both practical and so to speak mystical, on that supplicant from whom heaven springs.






A young man staying in a Paris boarding house finds a hole in the wall above his bed. Alternately voyeur and seer, he obsessively studies the private moments and secret activities of his neighbors: childbirth, first love, marriage, betrayal, illness and death, all present themselves to him through this spy hole. The book sweeps away life's illusions. The man leaves his home and life to hole up in the hotel where he is having a midlife crisis in extremis. He becomes an obsessive voyeur. He spies on fighting couples, trysts between cheating spouses, a thieving chamber maid, a priest who bullies a dying man, a lovely gay romance—just to mention a few scenarios. Through all of these dramas, Barbusse’s observations from the main character become an existential diatribe. Barbusse, very cleverly, fashions his protagonist as the everyman, honorable and decent and self-righteously affirmed in his belief until his belief is tested and found wanting. There is clearly a biblical element to Barbusse’s story of forbidden fruit and man’s subsequent downfall, which makes the appellation of the book all the more significant. But there is also another hell, which Barbusse is keen to illustrate, namely that of man’s perdurable yearning “for something infinite and something new,�� and the tragedy of this on-going inner conflict.

I do not know whether the universe has any reality apart from me. What I do know is that its reality occurs only through the instrumentality of my thought, and that in the first place it exists only through the concept I have of it. It is I who have brought the stars and the centuries into being, I who have evolved the firmament in my head. I cannot emerge from my mind. I have no right to do so, without falling into error or falsehood. I have no power to do so, either. Try as I may to struggle as if to escape from myself, I cannot invest the world with any reality other than that of my imagination. I believe in myself and I am alone, since I cannot emerge from myself. How could I imagine, except in madness, that I can emerge from myself? How could I imagine, except in madness, that I am not alone? What could possibly convince me that beyond the impassable frontiers of thought the universe has an existence separate from my own?





What is love? What are all those emotions at all? Just momentarily pleasures? Love may die one day as if it didn’t exist at all.Alas, one day I mat say to you: “I don’t love you any more.�� Alas, alas, I may say to you one day:”I have never loved you.��

All our thoughts, the greatest and the smallest, belong only to ourselves. Everything turns us in upon ourselves and condemns us to ourselves alone. You said that day:”There are things which you hide from me, and which I shall never know- even of you tell them to me.�� You showed me that love is only a sort of celebration of our solitude, and you ended up by crying out to me, as you engulfed me in your arms. “Our love is me!�� And I returned the, alas, inevitable answer: “Our love is me!��.






The idea of death is undoubtedly the most important of all ideas. Death is everywhere: in the ugliness of what has been beautiful too long, in the dirtiness of what was pure and undefiled, in the forgetfulness of what is far away, and in habit, that forgetfulness of what is close. The idea of death was everywhere. For what is horrifying is not death itself but the idea of death, which ruins all activity by casting a subterranean shadow. The idea of death: death which is alive. Hope is unhappy, because it hopes, No more prayer: prayer too is indigent, because it is a cry which rises and abandons us. No more smiles: isn’t smile always half-sad? We smile at our past melancholy, anxiety, solitude, at our passing grief; a smile doesn’t last, for if it lasted it wouldn’t be; its nature is to be dying.



Why the title “Hell��? Possibly because the narrator became addicted to looking through the hole in the wall. He found that life is raw and pointless and it wears you out. The man peeps through the hole acts as a God like character who watches everything through the hole but can’t do anything about it. It reminds me of Satre’s concept of ‘Others��, life seems to be unfolding its different realms in the next room, people there play out all the acts of drama called life but they are oblivious to the narrator peeping through next room. Human, as self- conscious beings who are condemned to hell right from their birth. The problem lies not in the suffering of life but the very realization that happiness lies within suffering. Life takes birth out of death. The narrator observes through the window various manifestations of human emotions- love, sadness, betrayal, adultery, illness and death. The room acts as observatory hideout of human life which we watch through the anxious eyes of the narrator, remaining glued to our seats, we feel the stir of solitude of human existence through our spine.



Where is God, then, where is God? Why doesn’t he intervene in the appalling regular crisis? Why doesn’t he prevent by some miracle the horrifying miracle by which what is adored becomes suddenly or slowly hated? Why doesn’t he save man from the quiet bereavement of all his dreams, and also from the distress of that pleasure which bursts forth from his flesh and falls back on him like spittle?

We think therefore we are. It is us who have endowed the universe with exorbitant qualities, which exist within us, we must have endowed it with them since, even if it possessed them, we could not prove the presence of what cannot be proved, and would have to contribute them from our own resources, to complete the limited concept we have of it; all things are only ways of imagining reality, and so to speak vague powers we possess. The author strips man of all his externals and perhaps that is what he wishes to show. Others stand for imagination but he stood for the truth. Through 'Hell' Barbusse penetrated into very heart of mankind and returned, found nothing human in this dancing caricature.


A must read.
5/5