The British art critic John Berger said that hell is a place with no horizon.
What defines the place of eternal despair is not physical suffering, but claustrophobia. For the damned, there is no elsewhere, no otherwise, no possibility of change or escape. The awareness presses on them heavier than granite.
Berger was writing about Hieronymous Bosch, specifically his famous triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, a three-paneled painting depicting Eden, earth, and hell. Viewers have long been drawn to the panel for its strangeness. Where other artists have portrayed hell as a place of torture, it’s impossible to look at Bosch’s version and not see absurdity. A pair of enormous, fleshy ears wield a carving knife. A pig in a nun’s habit tries to seduce an emaciated man. A rabbit skewers a woman by her feet. Another figure dangles in the strings of a harp. To Berger, part of hell’s claustrophobia comes from its lack of meaning: “There is no continuity between actions, there are no pauses, no pattern, no path, no past and no future. There is only the clamour of the desperate, fragmentary present.”
As I scroll past images of a child crushed to death by rubble, then a beautiful British country home surrounded by tulips, then an advertisement for shampoo, I have to agree.
If actions have no meaning, if all choices are equally absurd, then escape is impossible. Berger dubbed capitalism and globalization the primary keepers of our modern hell as they flattened communities to markets, culture into commerce, individuals to consumers, art to advertisement, choice to opportunity cost. Though he was hopeful about the possibilities of communism in his earlier decades, as he witness the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, he sought alternatives. He walked deeper into art, into poetry, into the Swiss mountains, searching.
I wouldn’t call my world hell, but I do sometimes feel the claustrophobia Berger described. I make thousand choices every day, but like the three dozen brands of peanut butter in the grocery store, the options feel like versions of the same thing. I struggle to make meaning in this world, in my life, in this time.
But I refuse to lie on the mat. I turn again to Berger: “First a horizon has to be discovered.” I don’t think he means “discover” the way an early seafaring human might have found an uninhabited island, but the way a sculptor “discovers” the figure waiting in the marble.