Daily Disch.

“She addressed the roaches with the same desperate intensity with which she sometimes (though not often in recent years) addressed prayers to the Almighty. Once she had prayed all night long to get rid of her acne, but in the morning it was worse than ever. People in intolerable circumstances will pray to anything. Truly, there are no atheists in foxholes: the men there pray to the bombs that they may land somewhere else.”

-Thomas Disch, “The Roaches,” in Fun With Your New Head. New York: Doubleday, 1968. (7-8)

“ ‘It's just as well that God is dead at last. He was such a prig. Some scholars have professed to find it odd that Milton's sympathies were with his fiend and not with God, but there's nothing remarkable in that. Even the Evangelist more often purloins his fires from hell than heaven. He certainly gives it much closer attention. It's simply so much more interesting, not to say relevant. Hell is closer to the facts that we know.

“ ‘Let's carry our honesty even a little further. Hell is not merely preferable to heaven—it's the only clear notion of an afterlife—of a goal worth striving toward—that human imagination has been able to devise. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans originated our civilization, populated it with their gods, and formed, in their chthonic wisdom, a heaven underfoot. Some heretical Jews inherited that civilization, changed its gods to demons, and called heaven hell. Oh, they tried to pretend there was a new heaven somewhere up in the attic, but it was a most unconvincing deceit. Now that we've found the stairs to the attic, now that we can zoom about anywhere we choose in that unpopulated and infinite void, the game is up, absolutely, for heaven. I doubt the Vatican will survive to the end of the century, though one should never underestimate the power of ignorance. Oh, not the Vatican's ignorance, for heaven's sake! They've always known which way the deck was stacked.’

[…]

“They left the room together, followed by the guards, but Skilliman couldn't resist coming back for yet one more Parthian shot. ‘Don't be downcast, Louis. I was bound to get the better of you. Because, you know, I have the universe on my side.’

“Schipansky was not there to be made distraught, and I allowed myself a riposte. ‘That's just what I find so vulgar.’ ”

-Thomas Disch, Camp Concentration. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988. (152-5)