But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.

He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire.

Sometimes I think he will become quite desperate — with the pain of simply being himself — he might do anything.

For a while everything became too terrible, one could scarcely bear to be conscious.

He thought, I haven't got much longer before some sort of collapse. He could not think if this would be a collapse of mind or of body. Mind and body seemed utterly fused now in cold aching pain, and darkness.

You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain.

Willy seemed like an inhabitant of some other dimension who could only tenuously communicate with the ordinary world. This would have troubled her less if she had not imagined his other dimension as a place of horror.

Ordinary consciousness simply becomes pain.

Yes, I've endured so much, and you seem to think this means I will endure anything. It does not.