Hell is … a failure of openness, a failure of love and a consequent and dreadful entrapment within the self.
Thus Tony Milligan, in Love, who goes on to note that for Milton love of others and hell, defined as ‘hell within’, are mutually exclusive.
Recognition, misrecognition or non-recognition
… our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Non-recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.
Thus Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism
Friendship
Friendship is a basic and vital human relationship that forms the social fabric of our lives. It is in and through friendships that we discover our identity, gain our sense of value and place in the world, and learn what it means to participate in community. … friendships aid the development of our self-identity. Through friendships, we discover where we want to go in life and how we should relate with others and with God. Friends help us to recognize one another and the world.
John Swinton, Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil
An instrument of torture
And my final quote from Sophie Divry’s The Library of Unrequited Love, this time on the Dewey decimal classification:
What a perverse invention, an instrument of torture. … Stupid, anarchic, mega-moronic. The Dewey system is a secret code invented by the Axis of Evil that binds books and librarians together in order to scare the reader off. It’s terrifying, the Dewey system. Totally inhibiting. Everything goes into it, like a mincer. Your holidays, your house, your tastes, your furniture, just everything. There’s even a classification for sexuality – and plenty of different shelfmarks for all the complications. … I’m telling you, if no-one stops them, the people on the ground floor will end up putting a shelfmark on all of us ….
Homeric battle
The library is the arena where every day the Homeric battle begins between books and readers. In this struggle, the librarians are the referees. … Either they’re cowards and take the side of the mountain of books, or they bravely help the worried reader.
Sophie Divry, The Library of Unrequited Love
Sparks
Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment in a person’s life, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life.
Sophie Divry, The Library of Unrequited Love
Karl Möller 