Heaven and Hell
Hi guys.
As promised, here is some wisdom from Generation of Swine.Last Saturday, I was invited by the Aspen Writer’s Foundation to read some of Hunter’s work at a writing seminar gathering. I read from the introduction, where Hunter describes what Heaven and Hell would be like. He said that all we know for sure is that Hell “will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix – a clean well-lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except for the ones who know in their hearts what is missing…” and being driven crazy because the one thing you want is not there.
Here is what he said about Heaven:
Heaven is a bit harder to figure, and there are some things that not even a smart boy can tell you for sure…But I can guess. Or wonder. Or maybe just think like a gambler or a fool or some kind of atavistic rock & roll lunatic and make it about 8-1 that Heaven will be a place where the swine will be sorted out at the gate and sent off like rats with huge welts and lumps and puncture wounds all over their bodies – Down the long black chute where ugliness rolls over you every 10 or 16 minutes likes waves of boiling asphalt and poison scum, followed by sergeants and lawyers and crooked cops waving rule books; And where nobody laughs and everybody lies and the days drag by like dead animals and the nights are full of whores and junkies clawing at your windows and tax men jamming writs under your door and the screams of the doomed coming up through the air shaft along with white cockroaches and red stringworms full of AIDS and bursts of foul gas with no sunrise and the morning streets full of preachers begging for money and fondling themselves with gangs of fat young boys trailing after them… Ah…But we were talking about Heaven…or trying to…but somehow we got back into Hell.
–Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine
Your friend,
(copyright Estate of Hunter S. Thompson)
