I’ve spent several sleepless nights worrying about the consequences of my willing embrace of Greed. Perhaps (I think in a kind of reconsideration) there is a reason that these are called the Deadly Sins?

There is my own soul and self at risk, of course, but I’ve I also mentioned three other matters of concern for a bibliophile contemplating a stay in hell:

1. will I be able to take my books with me to hell?
2. just what is the temperature down there?
3. will there be sufficient shelf space?

In search of answers, and in hopes of easing my troubled mind, I consulted James Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, since its rousing depiction of the amenities of hell is the most vivid I have ever come across. If I’m hellbound, I reasoned, I might as well get to know the lay of the land.

Storage space, it seems, will not be a concern, since the walls of hell “are said to be four thousand miles thick” — sturdy enough to support even the most heavily laden shelves.

But it turns out that “the fire of hell gives forth no light”. So much for reading late at night in bed. I suppose I could try to sneak in an Itty Bitty Book Light, but I have a hunch that hell’s gatekeepers have dealt with greedy book buyers before and would find it in a flash during the pre-entrance strip search. Even if the smuggling attempt were successful I can’t picture hell having a corner store which could supply me with replacement batteries (“Sorry sir: we just sold the last one. Again…”)

I’m having second thoughts about taking my books with me anyway since it appears that hell is a little hotter than I’d imagined:

The devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up in an instant like a piece of wax. […] The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

This doesn’t bode well for my signed first editions; hell seems to be just one bit of bad news after another. In fact I am now officially reconsidering my “pro” position on Greed.

But what if I’m sent to hell anyway? I pored through Joyce looking for a silver lining and by Jove, I think I found one. You’re familiar with that button sported by harried bibliophiles: “So many books, so little time”? In hell you’d have an eternity to catch up on unread books:

You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

At last: some good news! If I don’t manage to finish Remembrance of Things Past before I die, there seems to be at least some hope of getting through it post-mortem…