Paradise

The commonly-held conception of heaven has never held much appeal for me: there you are, up in the clouds, surrounded by all your relatives, with, as far as I can see, nothing really to do besides hanging out in each others’ divine presence; it’s always struck me as the worst version of a Thanksgiving holiday, without even football, beer, or mashed potatoes.

In Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous novel, Gilead, the aged Presbyterian preacher, Reverend Boughton, surmises that to conceptualize heaven, we need simply imagine all the pleasures in life times two; and while that’s sort of like a Doublemint gum version of paradise, it’s easier for me to make sense of, mainly since it’s not unlike actual experiences a person can actually have, simply by cycling to a lakeside park on a clear and warm late summer evening in the Pacific Northwest.

When the moon rises like an orange mushroom cloud behind the tree-lined hills of wealthy suburbs and paints an amber racing stripe over the surface of the region’s largest freshwater lake, and you can lie back in the water and see constellations of stars from one end of the celestial sphere to another, and the temperature of the air and that of the liquid in which you lie are so close that two of the four traditional elements merge into one; meanwhile, the third of that quartet dances merrily in a wading pool turned firepit so that summer’s holy grail combination of warmth and wet is achieved, well, then, it surely seems like all the pleasures available to a person living on planet Earth have been doubled already.

If heaven means “it doesn’t get any better than this,” then, all right then, mission accomplished..

In Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, Lucifer famously declare, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”  To each their own, I guess. 

If you ask me: “Better to bike on Earth than sit around in Heaven;” paradise found, right here.