"Hell is the impossibility of reason"

[Jonathan Lighter]

In the movie _Platoon_ (1986), scenarist-director Oliver Stone attributes
this proverb to "somebody once wrote...."  Stone later said that "I had
heard that quote somewhere years ago and I remembered it when I got to
Vietnam [in 1968]."

My searches reveal no likely antecedents. I suspect that Stone unconsciously
revised something else.

A plausible antecedent is the following, from a Jesuit source.  It is
unlikely that Stone was familiar with it:

1874 Edward Ignatius Purbrick_May Papers_ (London: Burns & Oates) 146: Hell
is the impossibility of loving; the impossibility of not loving is heaven."

The same definition of Hell was once offered as a paraphrase of Dostoevsky,
but the date here is far too late for Stone to have read it before 1968:

1975  Henri Peyre _French Literary Imagination and Dostoevsky_  (University,
Ala.: U. of Alabama P.) 34:"To hate one's own species in oneself, is not
that Hell?" (_L'Imposture_), which almost parallels the famous cry of The
Brothers Karamazov: "*Hell is the impossibility of loving*."

In any event, Stone's own definition of Hell (with many thousands of  RGs)
seems to count as an original inspiration even if suggested by something
else.


JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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