Wit & Attitude Quote by Arnold Bennett

Bennett turns the afterlife into a psychological trap, then slips the key under the door. The slyest move is his claim that hell, as an experience, is largely self-concealing: if you are fully inside it, you normalize it. Only Lucifer, the managerial class of damnation, can see the system as a system. Everyone else is too busy enduring, adapting, bargaining. It is a neat, almost bureaucratic vision of suffering: not flames and pitchforks, but a condition you come to live in until you forget it is a condition at all.

Then he gives purgatory its “secret function,” and the word secret matters. Purgatory isn’t about cosmic bookkeeping; it’s about perception. It is the transitional space that restores contrast, the narrative palate cleanser that makes “heaven” feel real rather than theoretical. Without the abrasion of penance, paradise risks becoming mere description, a sentimental postcard. Bennett suggests that bliss needs scaffolding: the mind can only register the good as good when it has been recalibrated by loss, discipline, or delay.

Coming from a novelist of early 20th-century British realism, this isn’t theology so much as social and moral observation dressed in Catholic costume. Bennett’s world is thick with routines, class constraints, and incremental compromises; “hell” is what people call ordinary life when it hardens into inevitability. Purgatory, in that frame, is any process that breaks habituation and makes you feel again - not redemption as miracle, but redemption as regained sensitivity.