CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination.
Elbert Hubbard
The Roycroft Dictionary and
Book of Epigrams, 1923
For some reason, too deep to fathom, men contend more furiously over the road to heaven, which they cannot see, than over their visible walks on earth.
Walter Parker Stacy
in Sam J. Ervin, Jr.
Humor of a Country Lawyer, 1983
Heaven is a Kentucky of a place.
Methodist preacher,
Federal Writer's Project
Kentucky: A Guide to the Bluegrass State, 1939
(William Taft) loathed being President and being Chief Justice was all happiness for him. .....Taft once said that the Supreme Court was his notion of what heaven must be like.
Felix Frankfurter
Reminiscences, 1960
If there be anything in me that is of permanent worth and service to the universe, the universe will know how to preserve it. Whatsoever in me is not of permanent worth and service, neither can nor should be preserved.
Horace James Bridges
in Joseph Fort Newton
"Concerning God"
My Idea of God, 1926
When we abandon the thought of immortality we at least have cast out fear. We gain a certain dignity and self-respect. We regard our fellow travelers as companions in the pleasures and tribulations of life....We gain kinship with the world.
Clarence Darrow
The Story of my Life, 1932
Man, tree, and flower are supposed to die; but the fact remains that God's universe is spiritual and immortal.
.....
In reality, man never dies.
Mary Baker Eddy
Science and Health, 1908
There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflichingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for.
Eric Hoffer
The True Believer, 1951
To me death is not a fearful thing. It's living that's cursed.
Jim Jones
Jonestown, Guyana
November 18, 1978
Death is not the cessation of life, but an incident in it. It is but the "narrows," to use the Psalmist's striking expression, through which the soul passes on its fateful voyage.
Morris Joseph
Judaism as Creed and Life, 1903
All victory ends in the defeat of death. That's sure. But does defeat end in the victory of death? That's what I wonder!
Eugene O'Neill
Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.....
George Santayana
Winds of Doctrine, 1913
Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?
William Saroyan
last words telephoned to Associated Press, 1981
We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
Tennessee Williams
Camino Real, 1953
Dear Posterity;
If you have not become more just, more peaceful, and generally more rational than we (were) - why then, the Devil take you.
Albert Einstein, ca. 1936
Timothy Ferris
"The Other Einstein," 1985
Can we actually "know" the universe? .....it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.
Woddy Allen
Getting Even, 1966
all of the above quotations are from -
The New York Public Library
Book of Twentieth-Century
American Quotations
(c)1992
Warner Books, Inc.
A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
Samuel Butler
Further Extracts from Notebooks, 1934
Good night.
Ensured release
Imperishable peace,
Have these for yours,
While earth's foundations stand
And sky and sea and land
And Heaven endures.
A.E. Housman
More Poems, 1936
If Max (Beaverbrook) gets to Heaven he won't last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell...after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.
H.G. Wells
Beaverbrook, 1972
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
Man and Superman, 1903
And he who gives a child a treat
Makes joy-bells ring in Heaven's street.
And he who gives a child a home
Builds palaces in Kingdom come.
John Masefield
The Everlasting Mercy, 1911
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
Rupert Brooke
Heaven, 1915
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully understand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return.
Earth's the right place for love;
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Robert Frost
Birches, 1916
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke
The Soldier, 1914
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no domain.
Dylan Thomas
25 Poems, 1936
I've been born, and once is enough.
T.S. Eliot
Sweeney Agonistes, 1932
Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.
John Masefield
Pompey the Great, 1910
Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
Charles Frohman
Last words before drowning
in the Lusitania, May 7, 1915
Charles Frohman, 1916
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov
Madame Bovary, 1980
O Death, where is thy sting?
Thy victory, O Grave?
Sir Ronald Ross
Philosophies, 1910
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1979
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1967
.....cricket - a game which the English...have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity.....
Lord Mancroft
Bees in Some Bonnets, 1979
There is no expeditious road
To pack and label men for God,
And save them bu the barrel-load.
Some may perchance, with strange surprise,
Have blundered into Paradise.
Francis Thompson
Poems, 1913
all of the above quotations are from -
The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations
edited by Tony Augarde
Oxford University Press, 1991
I'd like it to be a place where I have things to do but only things I want to do.
I'd like to have my Harley and smooth, pot hole-free roads to ride - mountains to see and ride through.
I'd like to walk in warm spring rain and not get cold from the wetness.
I'd like all the men to be honest and friendly and women to be beautiful and even more friendly.
I think heaven should be what ever each person wants it to be. It should be a place, or a state of mind, where nothing is so important that you can't put it off in favor of something more pleasant.
Oh, the coffee must be hot - always available - never tatse like it's been sitting around for hours. Gotta have my coffee.
The air should smell like wild flowers in late June - or maybe like freshly mowed grass. Maybe with the smell of burning leaves every few days for a change.
I'd like my wife and kids to know me there but not as husband and father - I'd like only to be their friend. To really know them all as friends.
What do I think it WILL be like? I wonder if I'll ever get to find out?
According to Sister "MaryElephant" it's going to be a bummer. She said we'd just sit around looking at God and that would make us happy. I dunno about that. Sounds kinda slow. Like a singles bar at 2 in the afternoon, on a Tuesday, in the winter. Know what I mean?
I figure it'll probably be something totally foreign to human understanding. Something that - if shown now - wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. That way, if you had a near death experience and understood what you saw, you'd not be tempted to kill yourself just to get back into it.
I don't think that human experience can tell you what it will be like. If it was something that could compare to human experience, then it wouldn't be all that special.®LS1¯
Bob Snead
The UnNamed BBS
Ambler, Pa.
Ive had dreams of Paradise where all you do is open your heart
& let the endlessness ooze out. It is quite something to go thru.
One night in Detroit - the death of my stepfather - weary &
hopeful of everything, I lay in bed grieving and wondering,
whereupon, 4 in the morn, the whole room began to expand &
I with it, giddy with silent affirmation - that is to say: It was
the feeling I feel each of us is rightfully entitled to & it doesnt
happen out in the world of gold and crashings but is a perfect
withinness, a peacefulness & surprise that is unkillable.
Dreams of Paradise
Al Young, 1965
HEAVEN: Collected Poems 1956-1990
(c)1992 Al Young
Creative Arts Book Company
Berkeley, California
Our Lady's Child
Hard by a great forest dwelt a wood-cutter with his wife, who had an
only child, a little girl of three years old. They were, however, so poor that they no longer had daily bread, and did not know how to get food for her.
One morning the wood-cutter went out sorrowfully to his work in the forest, and while he was cutting wood, suddenly there stood before him a tall and beautiful woman with a crown of shining stars on her head, who said to him, "I am the Virgin Mary, mother of the child Jesus. Thou art poor and needy, bring thy child to me, I will take her with me to be her mother, and care for her." The wood-cutter obeyed, brought his child, and gave her to the Virgin Mary, who took her up to heaven with her.
There the child fared well, ate sugar-cakes, and drank sweet milk, and her clothes were of gold, and the little angels played with her. And when she was fourteen years of age, the Virgin Mary called her one day and said, "Dear child, I am about to make a long journey, so take into thy keeping the keys of the thirteen doors of heaven. Twelve of these thou mayest open, and behold the glory which is within them, but the thirteenth, to which this little key belongs, is forbidden to thee. Beware of opening it, or thou wilt bring misery on thyself."
The girl promised to be obedient, and when the Virgin Mary was gone, she began to examine the dwellings of the kingdom of heaven. Each day she opened one of them, until she had made the round of the twelve. In each of them sat one of the Apostles in the midst of a great light, and she rejoiced in all the magnificence and splendour, and the little angels who always accompanied her rejoiced with her.
Then the forbidden door alone remained, and she felt a great desire to know what could be hidden behind it, and said to the angels, "I will not quite open it, and I will not go inside it, but I will unlock it so that we can just see a little through the opening."
"Oh, no," said the little angels, "that would be a sin. The Virgin Mary has forbidden it, and it might easily cause thy unhappiness."
Then she was silent, but the desire in her heart was not stilled, but gnawed there and tormented her, and let her have no rest. And once when the angels had all gone out, she thought, "Now I am quite alone, and I could peep in. If I do it, no one will ever know." She sought out the key, and when she had got it in her hand, she put it in the lock, and when she had put it in, she turned it round as well. Then the door sprang open, and she saw there the Trinity sitting in fire and splendour. She stayed there awhile, and looked at everything in amazement; then she touched the light a little with her finger, and her finger became quite golden. Immediately a great fear fell on her. She shut the door violently, and ran away. Her terror too would not quit her, let her do what she might, and her heart beat continually, and would not be still; the gold too stayed on her finger, and would not go away, let her rub it and wash it ever so much.
It was not long before the Virgin Mary came back from her journey. She called the girl before her, and asked to have the keys of heaven back. When the maiden gave her the bunch, the Virgin looked into her eyes and said, "Hast thou not opened the thirteenth door also?"
"No," she replied. Then she laid her hand on the girl's heart, and felt how it beat and beat, and saw right well that she had disobeyed her order and had opened the door. Then she said once again, "Art thou certain that thou hast not done it?"
"Yes," said the girl, for the second time. Then she perceived the finger which had become golden from touching the fire of heaven, and saw well that child had sinned, and said for the third time, "Hast thou not done it?"
"No," said the girl for the third time. Then said the Virgin Mary, "Thou hast not obeyed me, and besides that thou hast lied, thou art no longer worthy to be in heaven."
Then the girl fell into a deep sleep, and when she awoke she lay on the earth below, and in the midst of a wilderness. She wanted to cry out, but she could bring forth no sound. She sprang up and wanted to run away, but whithersoever she turned herself, she was continually held back by thick hedges of thorns through which she could not break. In the desert, in which she was imprisoned, there stood an old hollow tree, and this had to be her dwelling place. Into this she crept when night came, and here she slept. Here, too, she found a shelter from storm and rain, but it was a miserable life, and bitterly did she weep when she remembered how happy she has been in heaven, and how the angels had played with her.
Our Lady's Child (excerpt)
Grimm's Household Tales
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm
1812
Translation: Edgar Taylor
Chapter Eighteen
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