Some of you may have noticed the weather of late has been entirely too prominent. Colorful mega heat waves, tornados, hail stones the size of muskrats. Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
6When Willard Scott oversaw the weather on the Today Show, we did not have to endure these atmospheric scuffles. Willard kept things under control. Willard crossed over the great atmospheric divide in 2021. He can’t help us with the weather anymore.
Hell is accepted by many people as being hot.
With summer’s heat dome nestled lovingly over North Carolina, it is not too large a stretch to associate our weather with some approximation of the conditions in Hell.
We don’t have a lake of fire, yet. If, for an unfathomable reason, you walk barefoot at 3 p.m. on asphalt, you will experience on the soles of your feet what condemned souls suffer in Hell. Pro tip: If it is too hot to put your hand on the road, kindly do not subject your dog’s sensitive paws to the asphalt inferno. Burned puppy toes are a sign of a bad dog owner. But I digress.
Back to today’s topic.
What is Hell like? Do I want to go there? Once there, can I change my mind? Is Hell like the Hotel California? You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave? Will they accept major credit cards? With due respect to our heat waves, let us examine what Hell might be like.
Major religions each have their own views of Hell. In the interest of not being burned at the stake as a heretic, I will not attempt to summarize any religion’s beliefs about Hell. Joan of Arc was accused of being a heretic. At age 19, she was burned at the stake by the English in 1431. I hereby cite Ernest T. Bass of the Andy Griffith Show, who did not like Englishters. For any Englishter owners of a stake, charcoal, and a book of matches, please take note: I do not purport to hear voices and I do not speak French.
On a less theological note, consider what mere mortals have said about what Hell is like. Our old pal Mark Twain had some thoughts about Hell. One was “I would go to Heaven for the climate and to Hell for the company.” Huckleberry Finn was confronted with going to Hell due to his religious teachings if he helped Jim escape slavery.
Huck pondered the danger to his immortal soul. He ultimately determined to help Jim escape, saying: “All right then, I’ll go to Hell.” Davy Crockett said, “You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas.”
The cheerfully effervescent Friedrich Nietzsche opined: “One must not let oneself be misled: They say, ‘Judge Not’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.” Plato taught that Hell wasn’t a place where people were stuck forever, but where they could redeem themselves to escape Hell and go to Heaven.
It is a bit murky what kind of good stuff the dead could do in Plato’s Hell to improve themselves, but who am I to dispute Plato? The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote a play about Hell called No Exit. Several people who have died are in a room waiting to be told if they are going to Hell or Heaven. They get on each other’s nerves by various unattractive character traits. By the end of the play, they don’t care whether they go to Heaven or Hell, they just want to get out of the room and away from each other. In a Twilight Zone turn of events, it turns out they are going to be stuck in that room with each other for eternity. Sartre ends the play advising: “There is no Hell. Hell is other people.”
If you have ever been caught in a conversation with a Long Talker whom you could not escape, Sartre is your man.
Victor Hugo did not see Hell as the worst place to be. He might have been trapped by a Long Talker himself. Vic said, “An intelligent Hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” It is unclear if he was referring to Myrtle Beach.
Winston Churchill had some words of advice about Hell: “If you are going through Hell, keep going.” Winston’s quote was incorporated into a country song by Rodney Atkins with the immortal lines: “If you’re going through Hell, keep on going/ Don’t slow down if you are scared/ Don’t show it/ You might get out before the Devil knows you are there.”
Bill Shakespeare, who also had a way with words, chimed in on Hell. His character Ariel in The Tempest reported: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” Bill, like Nostradamus, may have been gifted with the ability to foretell the future, as his quote clearly describes the US Congress.
Have we learned anything today? Sorry, not much. Rodney Atkins might owe Winston Churchill royalties on his hit country song. To mangle Macbeth, this column “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”
Wear sunblock. It will finally cool off here in mid-November.

(Illustration by Pitt Dickey)