Pity
Pity—both the proper use and the misuse of it—becomes a central concern of the characters in the novel. As with so much of the lessons conveyed through dialogue and discourse, the value of pity and its use is conveyed through intense metaphorical imagery:
“Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round…the Pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty—that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones”
Shame
Another rich metaphorical image is called upon to convey the complicated concept of shame. The possibility for an emotional response to produce both intensely negative consequences and profoundly positive ones is made a bit clearer through the imagery utilized here:
“Don’t you remember on earth—there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it —if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.”
Hell Is Cramped
Hell is literally—well, literally in figurative terms—described as being tiny. Anyone who has ever argued that hell must certainly be a cramped space will find much to agree with in the text’s metaphorical description:
“If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.”
Time and Space
Time and space are linked inextricably together through a clear metaphor of revealing the inability of the mortal mind to comprehend the ineffable. Some as vast as time as a dimension beyond measure could only possible be figuratively symbolized as using a tool in the absolute most useless manner possible:
“Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all.”
Difference Between Heaven and Hell
The difference between heaven and hell is put across in a fairly straightforward manner by one character, though still keeping firmly within the metaphorical construct. Of course, within this particular philosophical perspective, hell would see to have to be much, much bigger than the description found elsewhere in the text:
“Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself.”
