'It depends on the way ye're using the words. If they
leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To
any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had bet-
ter not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye
understand.' (Here he smiled at me.) 'Ye can call it the
Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay
here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can
call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the
Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will
have been Hell even from the beginning.'
I suppose he saw that I looked puzzled, for presently
he spoke again.
'Son,' he said, 'ye cannot in your present state understand
eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the
Timeless he brought no message back. But ye can get some
likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they
are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley
but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those
who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all
their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to
have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They
say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make
up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will
work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.
And some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this
and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how
damnation will spread back and back into their past and
contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin
even before death. The good man's past begins to change so
that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the
quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to
his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is
why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the
twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say
"We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven," and the
Lost, "We are always in Hell." And both will speak truly.'
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