Quarter 2: New Goals, New Books. Week 1: Heaven V Hell

In retrospect, last quarter I messed up in the beginning, and made it too hard to come back in the end. This quarter I'm trying not to do that. In doing so I've made great headway in the Mitch Albom Book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I thought reading this was interestingly timed considering we are also reading The Inferno, in which Dante recounts the details of a trip through Hell. So far in the 115 pages I've read, I learned a lot about the life of the repairman at an amusement park who dies in an unfortunate accident, saving a little girl from a falling ride. Once reaching heaven, the reader learns that rather than being everything soft and perfect (as heaven had been described to me -- bear in mind I'm not religious at all), heaven is a stage in which one can reflect on his or her life. Interestingly enough, this is very different from what we read in The Inferno, in which people are pettily punished for their sins, in heaven people are not (according to Albom) rewarded in the same sense. Additionally, Albom seems far more forgiving the Dante. In Dante's world, someone who takes the life of another is deemed at minimum violent against thy neighbor and condemmed to a life soaked in a pool of blood. In Albom's world, a former militant can apparently still make it to heaven.