How "A Short Stay in Hell" Should Have Ended

So I read a book for my bookclub that filled me with so many thoughts that I wanted to explore them a bit more. In the quite likely evetn that you've never heard of A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck, here's my spoiler-free summary and review:

After death, a man is sentenced to a limited stay in hell before he can go to heaven. Of a multitude of hells, he is sent to a library filled with books of every possible combination of characters on a keyboard, and tasked to find the autobiography of his life among the near infinite number of nonsensical volumes. 

A lot of the goodreads reviews complain that at 100 pages it's hardly worth it's price tag. If you've spent more than $2 to see an entertaining, but ultimately superficial superhero movie sometime in the last decade, than Short Stay in Hell is definitely worth the $3 to $12 it takes to get hold of a copy. But I think what the reviewers were really getting at is that while Short Stay if very good for what is, it's incredibly disappointing for what it could have been but wasn't.  At 100 pages, it was too long (ironically) to just prove it's main premise--the vast and terrifying quantity of eternity-- but too short to explore the multitude of other themes it brushes against but never  delves in. 

It was a five-star book if you're looking for a fast, theologically-inspired horror story to keep you up at night. But by the time I reached the closing paragraph I felt so cheated of a much deeper storyline that ultimately I have no idea whether I liked it or not. A great book avoids preaching, but I felt this book avoided making a point at all.

Did someone say library of the damned? *my heart hurts*
Spoilers below

I think I felt cheated mostly because the author trespasses the law of Checkov's Gun. He loads three or four guns on the mantle in the first act and they remain unfired after the closing curtain.  Maybe it bothers me so much because as a religion-junkie I actually knew something of Zoroastrianism before I picked up the book. But why bother mentioning that Zoroastrianism is the "one true religion" over and over if it was just  for a "haha, suckers an obscure Mesopotamian religion is the right one" gag? And when a very short novel makes a point to explain the specifics of Mormon doctrine over several paragraphs, I assume it has plot significance beyond the moral dilemma of a cup of coffee.

I got to the end thinking "crap, eternity is a long time" but ultimately left me unchanged about how I view myself or others on this little blip that is mortality.

So here's how Short Stay in Hell should've ended:

In the opening pages we learn that a book on Zoroastrianism is on every floor (another red-herring, apparently). I understand that even that book would be infinitessimally difficult  to find, but one that's also many million times more likely to be found than a book that can only be found on one of the near-infinite number of floors.

So eventually our protagonist learns that Zoroastrinism is a dualistic religion. Good God and the Bad God are perfectly balanced in a cosmic tug-of-war for all eternity and so Zoroastrian Hell does not exist. Of course they are actually are confined to the library , but their Hell is a neutral rather than a negative place. Which they've known from the beginning. Elliot even says it, "I was stationed in the South Pacific in WWII--that was much more of a hell than this." So as Dire Dan's cult of torture made Hell much more Hellish, they discover they can also make from their neutral hell, a heaven.

Our Mormon main character thinks again on his mortal beliefs he previously explained about deification and the innate divinity of all mankind. He realizes that the people in the library, not the books, are the source of their mutual sanctification. Instead of the monotony he thinks is the reason why all the inhabitants of his hell are white Americans from the same period of time-- he realizes that the people most like him are the people most easily understood. The people easiest to work and empathize with.

Working together they could slowly become master sculptors, painters, singers, mathematicians, etc. as they teach each other the skills they learned and the books they read. And with an eternity to practice, everyone becomes a master (can we get pop-culture Dracula reference). If they can actually work together, they could becoming more and more God-like in their combined knowledge and practice. But I don't necessarily need a happy ending.

The food kiosks that they used to exploit to make bone weaponry, could provide seeds to germinate, pigments for paint, spices for scent, materials to carve and hew. And every Mormon guy knows who you work with, you love. What could be better than an eternity among the ones you've grown to love? But they can never get there. What at first seemed a far simpler task than finding the impossible book, is shown to be much more time consuming project. Charity is harder to fathom than eternity.

There's still the matter of free will. So to retain the same ending tone as the original: Eons pass, but factions reset their progress over and over in their attempts to make a heaven of hell. They can never get every one to catch the vision at the same time.

The book ends with our main character repeating the library rules to himself like a prayer.

"Rule #1: Please be kind. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Failure to do this will bring unhappiness and misery to you and your fellow citizens.

Rule #3: Nothing lasts forever. One day this will all just be a distant memory." 

An epilogue shows a progress report by Xandern on the citizens of the Library of Babel:

The inhabitants of Training Room #487 show no progress towards getting along with each other. I cannot recommend them for promotion to unrestricted eternities. They haven't been able to behave themselves even among their peer group of white, book-reading Americans.  

I am encouraged by some of their recent developments, although  I estimate the time until they pen their own autobiography, indicating that they see themselves as they are seen is twenty raised to the nine thousandth days away. 

I guess that's my Short Stay in Hell fan-fiction.
-Stephanie

Five Ways to Fall in Love . . . with Food

Hey Steph,I love food. It is not unusual for me to sit in front of a delicious plate of food and smile broadly with the words “This is my life! I get to eat this” running through my head. There are few things that compare with the delight of eating a slice of homemade bread hot from the oven or juicy peaches or gooey chocolate-chip-coconut cookies.

Stephanie Kilgast

My friends aren't surprised to hear about my love of food, for I admit this infatuation quite frequently. But this wasn't always the case. I used to think I wasn't skinny enough to say out loud that I loved food; if I ever did say it, I’d imagine the people around me thinking, “Yeah, we can tell by looking at you.”

And truthfully, I’m not sure I always loved food. I fell into the common trap of labeling all food either “good” or “bad,” and these labels made it really hard to truly enjoy food. If I was eating a “good” food, say, an apple or carrots, I would think, “I wish I was allowed to eat ice cream.” If I was eating a “bad” food, say, cookies or French fries, I would think, “You messed up again. You’re disgusting.” It’s hard to love food when eating either feels restrictive or guilt-inducing. 

I started to break free of these labels after taking a nutrition class. I was expecting the professor to second all these beliefs I had long held about good and bad foods. Instead, she taught that food is a beautiful gift we have been given to nourish our bodies and to bring enjoyment into our lives. She said that there was no such thing as good food or bad food. There was just food.

Since that class, I've slowly learned to love food, and it has been one of the greatest everyday joys in my life. Below are five ways for you to fall in love with food too:

      1)      Let go of the labels. What has been crazy to me about removing the “good” and “bad” labels from food is how many more foods I enjoy now. When salad was labeled “good” in my mind, I almost had an aversion to it because I felt like I had to eat it. Now, with the label removed, I really enjoy eating salad and sometimes choose it because I want to. Likewise, I have learned that I really don’t like most raw vegetables. They just don’t taste good to me. But whereas before I would have felt bad for not eating them or forced myself to eat them and not enjoy the experience, I just don’t eat them. No guilt because they aren't labeled “good” foods. Instead, I just eat cooked vegetables because those are delicious to me. (Seriously, go buy some heirloom tomatoes, onions, and squash at the farmer’s market—you can get cheap produce right before the market closes—and bake them in the oven. Divine!)

       2)      Listen to your body. Babies innately know how much to eat, and they stop when they’re full. Unfortunately, most of us become insensitive to how our bodies feel about what and how much we are eating. Ever-growing portion sizes at restaurants have increased our perception of a full meal. This, added to parenting proverbs like “finish the food on your plate,” makes it hard for us to learn to stop when we are actually full. As I've learned to listen to my stomach, I’ve found that I enjoy food so much more because I’m not stuffed or bloated when I am done eating. Also, I tend to eat fewer sweets because my stomach feels upset if I eat too much

Jamie McCaffrey

      3)      Learn about how your body works. Our bodies are amazing! Along with a plethora of other insights I gained in that nutrition class, I learned how our miraculous bodies use food to help us walk, breath, think, and live. As I've learned more about my body, I have gained motivation to provide healthy foods for it to work well. I feel a desire to eat fruits and vegetables rather than feel restricted to only fruits and vegetables.

       4)      Learn about where food comes from. Historically, we as a people once used most of our time to grow, raise, and harvest food. Now we spend much less of our time and our money on getting food, and I believe that has made us less thoughtful about eating. As I have learned more and more about the hard work that goes into producing my hamburger or the corn and peaches that I so adore, I have become more thoughtful about eating. I have slowed down and enjoyed the ritual of eating. I have felt a greater sense of gratitude for the food that is before me, which has made me enjoy my food much more than I used to.

       5)     Love yourself and then you’ll love your food. Food does not make you who you are, and your choices about food don’t need to define you. The truth is that part of learning to love food for me has been less about loving food and more about loving myself. As I have journeyed in accepting my body and valuing myself and all the complex facets of my being (not just my physical appearance), I have placed less value on what I look like. This has made my eating habits matter a great deal less. It has relinquished food from being a source of weight gain and ugliness. Now food is just one of many activities I enjoy.

One last thought before sending you on your way to loving food like a boss and gaining the sweet liberty of expressing your love of food freely: I found that learning to love food was a slow process. It has taken a great deal of mental retraining to remove the deeply ingrained habit of labeling foods. It was a test of persistence in actually changing the way I think, but eventually the labels disappeared (most of the time) from my thought process, and it has been so worth it.

Cheers, 

Amanda

Calories Are NOT Bad

I saw this from NPR’s Facebook account this morning:

“ Would you think twice about that 20-ounce soda if you were informed that it would take 5 miles of walking — or 50 minutes of running — to burn it off?”

With a link to it’s story, Reality Check: To Burn Off a Soda, You’ll Have to Run 50 Minutes  

There are many reasons this is idiotic reporting. Mostly because this is promoting anorexic thinking.

Source

Reality check: the average 30 year old woman burns 115 calories every waking hour, doing absolutely nothing.

Your body needs fuel. Food is not just something you eat to stop hunger pains, and then every morsel that passes through your mouth must be logged against how long it will take to run/walk/vomit off. Eating should not be an antagonistic activity. Striving to pass the smallest number of calories through your gut is not a goal, it's a disease.

Labeling Coke with a sticker that essentially reads “Warning: this food contains calories”--- is a horrible idea. Soda is not a bad choice because it contains 250 calories. Soda is a bad choice because those calories are unaccompanied by fiber, protein, vitamins, or fat. 

A coke and an avocado have roughly the same number of calories. That does not make the avocado junk food, nor should you pysch yourself up for a cardio workout every time you eat one. And while a rice cake may only have 35 calories, it is not a health food. Rice cakes provide nothing but simple sugars.

You can only eat so much in a day and your body requires certain amino acids, lipids, and other compounds that can only be obtained through eating. Soda contains none of those things. Thus you should usually spend your limited intake of food on those things that provide your body with necessary nutrients.  

I’d much prefer a sticker on Coke that reads: “Warning: these calories are purely for entertainment. NOT FOR MINDLESS CONSUMPTION”

*Steps down from soap box*
Stephanie

How a Japanese Internment Camp Reminded Me of Literary Theory

Hey Steph,

So I'm trying to check off the last few places in Utah that I've not been to. Not terribly far away from where I live is the Topaz Internment Camp, where over 8,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.

It was a sobering experience. There wasn't much left of the camp.

This is literally the only man-made part of the camp I saw.

The rest of the camp looked like this. 

As I walked around the dry landscape, I was reminded of a concept I learned back in my undergrad days as an English literature student. The concept relates to categories we have in perceiving the world: the Self and the Other. The Self references perceiving life through one's own experiences and perceptions. The Other references a group or concept outside of one's self; something alien or divergent from your experiences and perceptions. A running theme in literature is the Self learning to view the Other complexly and accepting the Other as part of the Self--that is, as similar to themselves.

For whatever reason, it seems that we humans have a long history with dealing with the Other poorly. The early Americans enslaved Black people because they were the Other. The Nazis imprisoned and killed the Jews for being the Other. Americans "relocated" Japanese Americans during World War II for being the Other.

And we still do it today. Far too many Americans fear all Muslims because Islamic extremists have terrorized Americans. There's far too much acidity in the words spoken by Democrats about Republicans. There's too much vilifying by Republicans of Democrats.

And we do this with individuals too. Someone hurts us, and our first response may be to focus in on this offense and remove the complexity of that person. She is thoughtless. He is a jerk. I would never say the things she said. I would never treat someone the way he treated me. Gone is a person that contains both good and bad attributes, leaving behind the Offender, the Other, someone without redeemable qualities.

Once we choose this lens of simplicity, it's hard to view people outside of that category that we have chosen for them. But I hope that we can choose to take a second look at those that hurt us, at those that scare us, at the Other, and reassess why people do what they do.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13:12)

It's a challenge, but I hope we can put aside "childish things" and recognize that "for now we see through a glass, darkly." We cannot fully understand others. We don't see the inner workings of their hearts. We don't know their sorrows and pains. We don't know the reasoning behind their actions. I wonder if becoming "a man," as Paul wrote, has a bit to do with seeing the Self in the Other, even when the Other has attacked us or hurt us.  

Cheers,

Amanda Kae

Sex and the Fertility Goddess: Why We're So Conflicted About Modern Femininity Part 2

So in honor of Halloween, I’m talking about sexualization. 

Actually.
...that is kinda clever

 On one hand, we live in the most promiscuous age in human history.

(I know. “Wait, as a responsible historian, shouldn't you assume that people of the past were essentially like us with the same desires and tendencies. ” You’re right. People have always had a natural inclination for promiscuity. But humans have also always had the capacity to foresee consequences. Great-grandma was not an idiot, and sex equaled pregnancy essentially up until 1918-ish when it became legal to sell condoms in the US.  

In case you missed the last two decades of “I Dreamed A Dream” anthems, being single and pregnant, while still traumatic today, was like the bullet-train to misery at almost any other place or time. So long story short: as a rule women, despite having fully-functioning hormone-producing ovaries, pretty much always waited to get married before they had sex until very recently.)

On the other hand, the sexualization of women is literally older than the alphabet. They think this statue is twenty thousand years older than the first glyphs used in either China or Mesopotamia. Notice how she doesn't have a face, but all the other important bits.

So it’s kind of a wash whether women face more pressure to be sexual creatures today than they did in the past. I guess, you might say that navigating the line between being sexy or chaste is itself the height of historical femininity, rather than femininity being one extreme of either option. I mean just take the cues from our ancient forebears. Aphrodite may have been the goddess of female seduction, and Artemis the goddess of virginity  but neither was the ultimate female deity in the Pantheon.  And it wasn’t just the Greeks who did that.

Essentially every religion makes a divine mother the the highest of all women, although she very often had more erotic and/or celibate peers. (Catholicism being the obvious outlier here with a more-than-chaste holy mother... but just go with me for a second here)  This mother goddess is also known for her creative and nurturing powers in most of her forms. Extending the physical title of mother to its symbolic meaning, these dieties preside over things like harvests, plantings, skills, crafts, wisdom, healing, and/or rainfall.  

Now obviously, I am not an adherent of ancient Egyptian/Norse/Shinto/Quechuan mythology. But how we frame our God/gods tells us something about how we view ourselves. And our modern goddesses are not maternal. Collectively we give a lot of attention to the straight-up sexpot aspect of femininity in whatever it's current popstar incarnation--mostly in reverence for the female body rather than female creative genius.

And I think that’s reason number two that we’re so conflicted about femininity. Our cultural paragons for femininity are beautiful but infertile. They are entertainers, repeating the words that someone else gave them. They have their fame for performing rather than writing, making, shaping, growing, creating.

And that’s the real crime of modern sexualization.  It's not that there is anything inherently wrong with acknowledging/talking about/celebrating the female aesthetic. But women, collectively have become like roses. It’s not that we haven’t always been valued for our form, but we also used to be praised for our function. In pursuit of  modern ideals we’ve lost our fragrance and fruit and are left only with quickly-fading petals. There is no lingering perfume or sustenance in our exemplary females.

(Side note to explain that the ability to produce edible, super-nutrient dense rosehips have largely been bred out of roses in preference for depth of color and/or vase life for the blooms. And your Valentine’s bouquet probably smelled like nothing so...sorry Juliet, roses don't smell as sweet. )  

Women are meant to be mothers, and not limited to the literal sense.  We are nurturers, healers, shelterers, but above all creators. Fertile, not just in the width of our hips, but in the abundance we produce from the pain we are willing to endure.

We labor. We create.  That’s what femininity is supposed to mean. A little sexiness is inherent in our power but that's merely a consequence. The real goal is being powerful. So go be awesome, you beautiful mother goddesses....and midwives. 

But that's for Part 3.

-Stephanie

Confessions of an Unemployed Postgrad

Hey Steph,

I've been kind of freaking out about the prospects of working full-time. I've never really valued productivity or, dare I say it, hard work. I'm about connecting with people more than I am about getting stuff done, so I work best when I see some value of connection in what I do--like say writing magazine articles about people. Alas, most jobs don't really entail this connection.

As I've had some time on my hands being unemployed and all, I've thought a lot about working; I've read a lot about working; and I've listened a lot about working via podcasts and lectures. And finally, an argument for hard work formed in my head (in actuality, I believe this argument for hard work to be more inspired than developed rationally).

But before I continue, a related thought from one of my recent readings. I've been reading Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. In his memoir/psychological theory, he discusses at length the necessity for individuals to have a meaning in their life to be able to survive--a theory he tested and experienced in his own life in the extreme setting of the Holocaust. He quotes Nietzsche several times throughout the book: "Those who have a 'why' to live can bear with almost any 'how.'" I think this is a true quote, and it relates to my worries about work. Now back to finding an argument for hard work.

Source

For the first few weeks of my unemployment, I didn't have a time that I needed to wake up, and I didn't have anything on my schedule that needed to get done. So, nothing really got done. I applied for jobs, but that was about it. In this driftless place, I had this thought during my scripture study: You are not living; you are existing. You are not managing time; time is managing you. You are not acting; you are being acted upon. If you truly value your agency, you will choose to use your time and manage it well. 

For the last several years, agency has been one of my favorite topics and elements of my worldview. I see agency as a great gift from God. However, for whatever reason, I never really felt like managing time was an important or even godly attribute. But, after these thoughts, for the first time in my life, being productive had nothing to do with getting things done but had to do with being in control of myself and my life. By not choosing to thoughtfully use the time allotted me each day, I was giving up my freedom of choice. Time washed over me without me making any efforts. I enslaved myself to time by not making any choices of using it.

All of this was driven home to me as I pondered it in the context of Nietzsche's quote. I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to get better at managing my time; it's definitely going to be a process. But I now have a why--outside of societal pressures to work hard--that will motivate me to make the change.

Cheers,

Amanda

14 Thoughts The Mormon World Will Have This Weekend

1. Watching the opening hymn:

2. When President Monson welcomes us to Conference:

3. When Elder Oaks is next to speak:

4. Watching The World Report:

5. ....Then again, maybe not?

6. "The Statistical and Financial Report"

7. Halfway through your second session:

8. When Elder Scott closes his talk:

9. Getting into Bed Saturday Night:

10. Ten Seconds After Thinking that:

11. Catching the end of Music and the Spoken Word:

12. Every time you see that hashtag:

13. When Elder Holland pauses:

14. After the last closing prayer:

Have a Fantastic Weekend, 

Stephanie