January 17, 2025

The month of January is a good time to talk about doors. Admittedly, it may at first seem to be a boring topic. What in the world can there be to say about doors? Have we finally run out of things to write about? But the imagination, which can see the world in a grain of sand, finds a wealth of significance in doors. Roman religion found them so important that it had a god of doorways and passages, Janus, after which the month of January is named. A portrait of Janus was sometimes mounted above a door, recognizable by the fact that Janus has two faces, pointing in opposite directions. In addition to its timeliness, the subject of doors has been on my mind because I have just read an acclaimed recent fantasy novel called The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix Harrow, who is also a historian. It was nominated for every major award in the field: the Hugo, the Nebula, and both the British and the World Fantasy Awards. As it turns out, a lot of people find doors interesting, because they are what The Ten Thousand Doors is about.

To be precise, the book is actually about Doors, which are distinguished from the uncapitalized variety by the fact that they take you not just outside the house but to another reality. Without self-conscious intellectualizing, Doors is a meditation on the nature and purpose of its genre of fantasy, which in recent science fiction critical theory has been defined as a type of fiction characterized by doors, or, to use a broader term, portals. The term “portal fantasy” became widely popular after its use in Farah Mendlesohn’s book Rhetorics of Fantasy in 2008. The plot of some of the most famous fantasies begins with its main character’s passage through some sort of portal from the ordinary world into another world of strangeness and wonder, though often too of terror and danger. Lewis Carroll’s Alice goes through a looking-glass. Most of us cannot actually enter them, though they do seem to show us another world, but a mirror does turn you into Janus, gives you a second face that is the reverse of your own, just by looking at it. Three children go through the back of a wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s series and find themselves in Narnia. Harry Potter goes through a door that is a wall to most people, a detail that will turn out to have its significance as we go on. In There Are Doors (1988), a minor novel by a major fantasist, Gene Wolfe, a man goes through doors in search of his lost girlfriend, as other men have done, from Orpheus to Dante. Love itself is a matter of doors, perhaps revolving doors, as one love ends but another begins. Richard Thompson, who, like me, is old enough to have passed through the doors of multiple love relationships, says in a song called “One Door Opens”:

One door opens, another shuts behind
One sun sets and another sun she rises
Love comes to you in old familiar ways
Love comes to you in shadows and disguises

Doors are where you find them, and January Scaller, Harrow’s protagonist, spends an entire novel searching for them. Doors can range from the literal to the figurative: that is, it counts as a Door when anyone passes some kind of theshold or boundary into a different world. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream counts as a portal fantasy because leave the court of the rational Duke and a legalistic father and flee into the woods, which turn out to be inhabited by faeries.

Doors are typically on hinges, but there are of course other varieties: folding doors, the sliding doors of the Starship Enterprise. And there are the doors in Robert Heinlein’s utopian novel Beyond This Horizon (1942), made into a meme, as they say, by an anecdote of Harlan Ellison:

[A] character came through a door that . . . dilated. And no discussion. Just: “The door dilated.” I read across it, and was two lines down before I realized what the image had been that the words had urged forth. A dilating door. It didn’t open, it irised! Dear God, now I knew I was in a future world!”

The example has been rightly used as an example of the science fictional technique of creating an alternate world by showing rather than telling. But Ellison is also talking about how the strange differences of alternate worlds can defamiliarize and thereby evoke a sense of wonder, even about something as commonplace as doors.

Not all fantasies are portal fantasies, of course. Mendlesohn recognizes four types—and yet the other three are defined in relationship to the concept of the portal. In some fantasies, the movement is in the opposite direction, as someone or something enters our world from some other place. Horror is, to my way of thinking, the dark end of the spectrum of fantasy, or of romance, to use the more traditional and inclusive term for the genre of which fantasy is a modern development, and, in a good deal of horror, something wicked this way comes via some kind of portal—the TV set in the movie Poltergeist (1982) for example. In the good old days, the bad old magicians used a pentagram or pentacle diagram as a portal by which to conjure spirits from the demonic realms. Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter gets to Mars, or Barsoom, when, escaping hostile Indians, he ducks into a cave with a convenient spell-caster in it. In a third type of fantasy, which Mendlesohn calls “immersion fantasy,” there seems to be no portal, the famous example being The Lord of the Rings. No one travels to Middle Earth: we are simply immersed in it from the first paragraph. Ah, but there is a portal: the book itself, which the reader enters as Alice enters the looking-glass. All books are portals, and they open far more than a mere ten thousand doors.

The fourth variety of fantasy concerns the phenomenon of the liminal, subject of a newsletter some time ago. Liminality is the strange interpenetrating of the opposites often signified by the Door’s threshold. Janus is a personified metaphor, a two-in-one, and thus innately paradoxical. Macbeth’s witches spout all sorts of liminal aphorisms, such as “Fair is foul and foul is fair” and “Nothing is but what is not.” Hamlet is so ambiguous that T.S. Eliot pronounced it an uninterpretable failure, but it is in fact a play about the liminal. A recent kind of fantasy has been called “slipstream” because not only the rules of reality but the rules of genre become indeterminable in such stories. Still, liminality signifies a Door, even if the characters may remain trapped on the threshold.

There are those, of course, who find fantasy lacking in literary importance because it is “unreal.” In “real life,” there are no mysterious other realms, and no Doors by which to enter them. Serious literature explores the one true world, this world, and helps us to understand and cope with its limitations, rather than trying to escape them. It is an accusation to be taken seriously, which is not the same as merely accepting it. For what exactly do we mean by escape? Typically, the characters in both fantasy and traditional romance begin in an ordinary reality that is safe and easy, even if limiting or boring, whereas the alternative realm they travel to is full of threat and hardship. Well, but for the reader, the hardship is just vicarious and not actually suffered. But still, one part of the reader is longing for that other world not despite but partly because of that hardship, which is part of a life lived actively, a life that could make a difference. Maybe if offered the choice, most readers would shrink back and remain in their mundane comfort zone—but we are complicated creatures. Part of us longs for a world that is much harder than a life of privileged security, but is more fiercely alive. The longing is not for suffering it itself—those who are not privileged suffer a great deal and get nothing for it—but for suffering as the price of participating in a life that has significance and emotional depth. The Narnia books touch upon this through the irony that the children are packed off to the country to keep them safe from the London blitz in World War II, but with the result that they discover a Door into a realm in which they are in almost continuous danger.

Like every other symbol or myth, doors are multivalent. There is no single meaning to a symbol, whether it is found in a myth, a literary work, or a dream, which is why the code-book approach to symbolism is more or less useless. Any image is what the poet A.R. Ammons called “the form of a motion,” a still shot of what is really in metamorphosis. A simple-seeming image like a door unfolds into myriad variants, forms associations and networks with other images. There are indeed ten thousand doors, and ten thousand worlds. Yet they are not random: there is a pattern, though no one can master it. All of which is, if nothing else, an explanation of why these newsletters get so long! One image, or one thematic pattern, is like a seed: with a little care and attention, it germinates, it exfoliates, and eventually it may become the world tree, the entire cosmos in all its truth and beauty. Ten thousand doors potentially mean ten thousand newsletters: the imagination is inexhaustible, even if the writer is not.

Yet the plot of The Ten Thousand Doors of January turns on the fact that someone is searching the world trying to find all the doors and close them, shut them down. For a door may be also be exclusionary. A closed door may keep out danger. It may be protection against enemies, like a castle drawbridge. An airlock is a sealed door to keep life in and the deadly vacuum out. A terrifying image that we have all seen in dozens of TV shows and movies is that of a door shaking and splintering as someone tries to break through it from the other side. It can be an image literally out of our nightmares, like that of a psychotic and demonically possessed Jack Nicholson halfway through the axe-broken door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). One of the imagination’s primary acts is to create a boundary, a sacred circle called by scholars the temenos. In Paradise Lost, Milton reimagines the original Creation in this way, as the Son of God’s first act is to ride out in his chariot into Chaos and, with golden compasses, draw a circle separating Chaos from cosmos. Ancient cities were frequently designed with the temenos as a ground plan, a sacred circle crossed internally by two main streets in a mandala pattern. Doors are entrances and exits from the temenos. There are 12 gates to the heavenly city of New Jerusalem, 3 in each of the 4 directions. Doors and gateways have guardians to protect them, ranging from temple demons to supercilious butlers and battleaxe secretaries who protect the rich and powerful. Even the gates of hell have their watchdog, the 3-headed Cerberus. Burglaries are traumatic far beyond any monetary loss. They are an invasion of the safe space of the home. I am still haunted by an image from 40 years ago, of coming back to a friend’s home to find she had been burglarized: the door smashed violently into 3 ragged pieces, one of them still hanging off the hinge like a broken wrist, the house ransacked. We buy locks, but are fascinated with those who can pick them, gain entrance into the home or the bank vault. The Internet has its exclusionary doors too, password protected. As we are fascinated by safecrackers, we are fascinated by hackers who can gain access to what is locked away. Thus, doors can be opened for nefarious purposes by either of the two forms of evil, force or fraud.

Xenophobia is the fear of home invasion on a collective level. Unscrupulous politicians, a whole party of them, have deliberately connived to make the public feel vulnerable and afraid by portraying immigrants as a horde of criminals, rapists, and drug dealers breaking through the protective line of the border. It is somewhat less than amusing to listen to Donald Trump, a convicted criminal and rapist, rant about all those criminals and rapists coming from Mexico and…Canada? Immigrants are portrayed as monsters, breaking in as Grendel breaks into the hall of Heorot in Beowulf, as the Big Bad Wolf gains entrance and swallows Grandma. Monsters are “other”: since immigrants look different from the white people who define themselves as the norm, it is easy to make frightened people think they are not human. It is by no means an accident that the greatest of all horror writers, H.P. Lovecraft, was also a virulent racist and xenophobe.

But phobia is in the mind of the beholder. What is really on the other side of the door, and why is it feared? Elsewhere, I have borrowed a word from the scholarship of Celtic mythology, in which the realm of the faerie is known as the Otherworld. That is the first clue. What is on the other side of the door is “other.” It is unknown, different, and “strange”—a word that occurs frequently in the final romances of Shakespeare. There is a weirdness that may unnerve conventional, “normal” people—although it may attract unconventional people, who feel weird and “other” themselves, partly because they may be regarded so. Lady Gaga referred affectionately to her original audience of outcast types as “little monsters.” In her early performances, her bizarre outfits made her into a kind of walking Otherworld. We are afraid, at least initially, of anything that is different: we see this response in children, and some of it may be hard-wired, a fear of possible danger. I have watched deer shy away from anything left out in the yard, approaching cautiously to check it out.

Not all differences are physical. A common complaint about immigrants (legal or no—it makes no difference to xenophobic people) is that they “don’t speak English” and “they don’t assimilate,” meaning that they have customs and dress that are different from those of white middle-class Americans. The angry, defensive tone in which such comments are made indicates fear. If you say that there is nothing to be afraid of, they will make up stories about immigrants eating white people’s pets. I have had students say they are irritated when employees at an Asian restaurant talk to each other in their native language, because they could be making insulting remarks about the customers. How insecure do you have to be to fear that? The “door” in this context is the border, and the job of government is to keep that border firmly shut against the threat of those who are sometimes called “aliens.” Science fiction has been examining this subject for a long time in the form of the human reaction to extra-terrestrial aliens. The chief villain in The Ten Thousand Doors of January is an English imperialist in the time of the British Empire, in which native people were regarded as “inferior races” because of their racial and cultural differences even in their own country. January Scaller learns this because she is not white. In the United States, there have typically been not just national borders but divisions within cities and towns along lines of race and social class. Again the doorway is not literal, but there is a barrier, as when someone is said to be “from the wrong side of the tracks.” Consorting across the lines is like fraternizing with the enemy on a battlefield, and sometimes regarded as treasonous. The reaction is not unique to the United States: ask Romeo and Juliet. The plot of Romeo and Juliet resembles that of the star-crossed lovers Pyramis and Thisbe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who are separated by a wall that has no door, so that they have to converse through a chink in it.

Fear of otherness is closely related to the fear that drives the villains in Ten Thousand Doors, the fear of change. Opening the doors to difference could itself bring change. But there is a deeper fear. In Celtic mythology, the Faerie dwell in a realm said to be the other side of this world, which scholars have named the Otherworld. In their lighthearted way, the fairies of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream represent the nature of the Otherworld, which is metamorphosis. In addition to the Celtic influence, the play features a number of references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, including to the story of Pyramis and Thisbe, which derives from it. What happens in the woods at during the night the play transpires is metamorphosis: thanks to the fairies’ “love juice,” the lovers metamorphose in and out of love with different partners, and Bottom is given the head of an ass. In the morning, the events seem like a dream. For dreams are gateways to another realm, and the two methods by which dreams alter images and events from the waking world, what Freud called “condensation” and “displacement,” amount to a kind of metamorphic algorithm. Things are fused with other things; things change into other things. Nothing is commoner than a two-in-one: “It was my father, but it was also the president.”

The deeper fear of change is that this habit of metamorphosis may be contagious. Hence the bizarre anxieties about the “grooming” of children to become gay, lesbian, or trans. Ironically, the right-wing parents and politicians who are up in arms about grooming could cite liberals’ own theories against them. If gender were “natural,” it would be biologically fixed and unalterable; but if it is socially constructed, as progressive theory claims, then it can be socially reconstructed. Freud was correct that, whatever is true of animals, human sexuality is polymorphous because it is controlled by the imagination, not by fixed instincts. There is no limit to the metamorphoses of human desire, certainly not the limit of social taboos. Freud was also right to regard the development of human sexuality as coming to focus on the body’s orifices: oral, anal, and genital. For the body is itself a temenos, and its orifices are potential doors for entering. Rape is more than unwanted sex: it is a violation, a breaking into the protected space of the body through its doors. The word “penetration” may easily acquire ominous connotations. We could go further and say that the entire body is in a way a multiplication of doors, for the body’s structural components, the cells, are based on the nature of the semi-permeable membrane, which is a minute door. This is more than just cleverness.

The concept of doors as passageways is in the process of being extended by scientific theory. The theory of the multiverse is at present only speculative, but something about it has caught the popular imagination, and I suspect it is the intuition that we live in a multiplex reality. The idea that there is only one reality, and that it is the task of proper socialization to “adjust” to it is coming to be seen more as ideology than fact. The powerful people of the world, the would-be oligarchs and autocrats, very much want the larger population to believe that the social condition that they live in is “reality,” and therefore unchangeable. The villain of Ten Thousand Doors is a man appropriately, if not subtly, named Mr Locke. He has lived for several centuries, experienced the upheavals of the 18^th century, including the French and American revolutions, and hated the chaos they unleashed, beginning with the storming of the locked gates of a prison, the Bastille. More deeply, he hated the loss of privileges on the part of the rich and the powerful who desire a life in which those privileges are changelessly secure. It is at this point that Alix Harrow’s profession as historian influences her fantasy. For the later 17^th through the early 19^th centuries was a period, not just of social change, but of a deeper and more fundamental change from traditional mythology, in which both cosmic and social order were fixed by divine decree, to modern mythology, which is inherently revolutionary and changeable. The Romantics saw that the real door is a mental one. Social change depends on first throwing open the doors of the imagination. This will not just change our social attitudes—it may change the nature of reality itself. In a famous aphorism, Blake said that, if the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is, infinite. Since he is talking about seeing, you might think he would have referred to windows rather than doors, but I think the choice is deliberate. Windows are what we look through onto the outside, but doors are passageways to the outside itself. We are capable of walking out of our prisons, as out of the self-imprisonment of Plato’s Cave, into the sunlight of a new world.

Or worlds. Once change is unleashed, there is no containing it. Before the theory of a multiverse, modern science had already given us a new universe of many worlds. The old Ptolemaic cosmos had a number of spheres, 9 in Dante’s version, with our earth at the center, and the other 8 were indeed inhabited by supernatural beings. But the new Copernican cosmos did far more than put the sun rather than the earth in the center of the temenos of the solar system. As a few thinkers saw, most notably Giordano Bruno, in the new system there was an infinity of worlds. The furniture of the temenos had not just been rearranged: the whole idea of a cosmic temenos was exploded—literally exploded according the the Big Bang theory that came much later. I think that is the real reason they burned him at the stake in 1600, for the idea of an infinite universe is far more disturbing than that of a heliocentric one. Indeed, we have Pascal’s famous saying in the 17^th century to prove it: “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me.” Northrop Frye pointed out in a centrally important essay called “New Directions from Old” that modern mythology since the Romantic period is full of images of “outer space” as inhuman and alienating. While that is true, I think the full situation is more complicated, for at the same time there is in some quarters there is a sense of the exact opposite, of “outer space” as a new realm of wonder. In early science fiction before the 1960’s, before the techniques of literary irony took over, the very reference to “the stars” was accompanied by a “sense of wonder,” a mystical yearning. This was not merely a nostalgic desire to return to the old Ptolemaic cosmos. The single science fiction novel I can think of for which that was true was C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938). No, it was the new infinite cosmos that allured us—for I grew up during that time—and it still does.

The problem has only been the lack of a door. We seem exiled on planet Earth, or at best confined to the solar system. Getting to the stars by present methods would take centuries. So science fition has been prolific in the invention of new kinds of doors that would enable travel to alien worlds. One is FTL, faster than light travel, attained by the handwaving device of some kind of “warp drive” that Mr. Sulu and many another could engage to send the ship through the threshold of some kind of space warp, a doorway through which whole spaceships could travel to interstellar locations. More recently, astronomical theory has suggested that black holes may somehow function as “wormholes” into which we could disappear and appear elsewhere. A typical example is the series of novels by Frederick Pohl that began with the significantly titled Gateway (1977). Christopher Nolan employed the idea of travel through wormholes in Interstellar (2014), ensuring scientific accuracy by hiring as consultant the Nobel-winning gravitational physicist Kip Thorne.

A wormhole is, in theory, a nexus of realities. What is implied, in other words, is not just linear travel but a webwork of locations. In the language of information technology, a “portal” is a website from which users may travel to a host of other sites: in other words, a nexus. Fascinatingly enough, the idea of a nexus of realities is ancient. A famous example is that of the Cave of the Naides in the thirteenth book of the Odyssey. At that point, Odysseus has finally returned to Ithaca from the Wanderings that took up a good part of the epic’s first half, and he needs a place to hide the gifts and treasures given to him by his rescuers, the Phaiakians. There just happens to be a convenient cave, however, to act as his safety deposit box. Yet, in a curious passage not necessary to the plot, the cave is described as a nexus of realities:“Of two entrances, / one on the north allows descent of mortals, / but beings out of light alone, the undying, / can pass by the south slit; no men come there” (13.134-37, Fitzgerald translation). That is the entire passage, brief yet haunting. It indeed haunted later mythology through an essay by the neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry called “On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey,” where it is discussed in relation to the soul’s journey. Word is that Christopher Nolan’s next project will be a film version of the Odyssey. One wonders whether the director who has been fascinated by the idea of doors to other realities through wormholes (Interstellar) and dreams (Inception) will pick up on this image. For in fact Odysseus’s journey home has been a travel through multiple strange worlds. That journey is now over, and we are told that Poseidon will close the passage to the land of the Phaiakians as punishment for aiding his enemy Odysseus. I have always felt that the placement of the Cave of the Nymphs episode here is thematic, as Odysseus leaves behind his wanderings in various lands full of strange and dangerous wonders and focuses for the epic’s second half on regaining his place in ordinary Ithaca, his home.

Those who are afraid of doors and the changes they make possible try in various ways to keep people from opening them. The most effective way is to close the doors of the mind. January Scaller turns out to be, not just a writer but a Writer. All writers may open doors, but a Writer can open a Door—however, she has to believe wholeheartedly that she can do so, as Peter had to believe that he could walk on the water. Yet all of us are conditioned all our lives to be doubtful that Doors even exist, much less that we have the power to open them. We are taught that this life is as good as it gets, trained in the virtue of accepting limits and calling it wisdom. January has been given an especially intensive training in such self-doubt and self-denial, because she is a late Victorian girl who is required to grow into a Victorian lady, and that necessitates rigorous training in obedience and passivity.

There is a classic story about this from exactly January’s time, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892). Gilman’s semi-autobiographical story is about a woman writer suffering from post-partum depression, “treated” for it by her physician husband by being locked into solitary confinement in what the reader eventually realizes was once a madhouse. The woman begins to see another woman trapped behind the design of a wallpaper, and works resolutely to free her. The wallpaper is a portal, and in the end the other woman is free, has crossed over into our reality. But the tragedy is that the doppelganger has become the protagonist, which signifies that the latter, who was not mad before, has gone mad as a result of the treatment. The story’s final image is that of a door: the woman has locked herself in her room, but throws the keys out the window to her husband, who, when he gets in, faints when he sees her crawling on the floor and raving. His worst fears have come true. Earlier, he had anxiously warned her about the dangers of an imagination overstimulated by her writing—and the story we are reading is that writing. It is likely enough that Harrow had Gilman’s story in mind, though she has said in an interview that January is partly modeled on her own younger self. January has nurtured herself by secretly reading classic children’s fantasies and adventure stories, and at one point her refusal to obey Mr. Locke gets her thrown into a madhouse. But we are still terrorizing women in order to keep them behind the locked doors of their homes. As has been repeatedly pointed out, that was the motive for the repeal of Roe vs. Wade. Abortion, like the ability to work at a self-supporting job, enables a woman to imitate Ibsen’s Nora in walking out the door and slamming it behind her, the last thing that happens in A Doll’s House. The old tradition of the groom carrying the bride across the theshold is said to symbolize the husband’s manly protection, because thresholds, being liminal, are dangerous. However, some link the image to that of the man capturing his bride by force and carrying her home—if she was a cave woman, by the hair.

The 60’s threw open many doors, as Jim Morrison named his rock group after Blake’s doors of perception. Blake also said that if the sun and moon should doubt, they’d immediately go out, and some of my generation tried to silence what Blake called the Idiot Questioner within us, who questions and questions but never has any answers. A generation later, in the 80’s, Joseph Campbell counseled people to “follow your bliss.” If you do so, he said, doors will open for you where you didn’t even know there was a door. The saying has nothing to do with any kind of superficial hedonism. Your bliss is what gives your life joy and a sense of meaning. The phrase conveys essentially the same message as Abraham Maslow’s advice to listen to your deepest “impulse voices” in order to become self-actualized. But it is easier said than done. We are more likely to act like the guests at the dinner party in Luis Bunuel’s film The Exterminating Angel (1962), who for some mysterious reason find themselves unable to walk out the door. Sartre’s understanding of the nature of hell is summed up by the title of his most famous play: No Exit.

Self-help extols the power of positive thinking, but we have to admit that negative thinking has its value. We fear, rightly, that “positive thinking” is just a pop-psych term for “magical thinking.” All around us lately are friends, family members, people to whom we were once close, who one day for no reason went “down the rabbit hole,” passed through the wrong door and are lost in a labyrinth of conspiracy-theory paranoia. Don Quixote was noble and brave in doing battle with the windmills he thought were giants, and the musical about him sang to us about dreaming the impossible dream, but we cannot forget that they were windmills all the same. For if you follow your bliss, you may well be mad. It took 125 years until Northrop Frye finally cleared Blake of that charge. Jesus said that faith could move mountains, but many of his followers today have faith that Donald Trump is his right-hand man, in which case I would answer with Huck Finn, “Okay, then I’ll go to hell.”

As so often, I end with the questions that I cannot answer. Believing in anything is such a risk that some people, especially intellectuals, try to play it safe by hiding behind a thoroughgoing skepticism. But there is no safety. Saying you believe in nothing means that you trust that your skepticism is absolutely true. Saying you are a relativist and that any belief is an equally valid opinion means that you have faith that your relativism is a reliable truth. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe someday we’ll find out, like the inhabitants of Terry Pratchett’s satirical Diskworld fantasies, that the world is a disk on the back of a giant turtle. And, of course, if we ask what the turtle is standing on, get the old stock joking response: it’s turtles all the way down.

The act of walking through a door is a decision, but on what basis do we decide? Well, it turns out that Jesus did have a suggestion: “Try all things. Hold fast to that which is good.” In other words, Jesus was a pragmatist of the William James variety. In The Will to Believe, James posed the thought experiment of a man who is on a mountain and is forced to leap across an abyss. The man who truly believes he can do it is more likely to succeed than the one who doubts. To a pragmatist, the true belief is the one that “works,” in whatever sense, because in the end there is no other kind of proof. The most terrible of all doors is that of death, what Canadian poet E.J. Pratt called “The Iron Door,” the title of a poem of 1926 on the death of his mother. Everyone we know passes through it and disappears forever, yet it remains closed, and we have no idea what is on the other side. Jesus harrowed hell on Holy Saturday, descended into it and brought out of it all the good people closed out of heaven since Adam and Eve were driven out of paradise and an angel with a flaming sword was placed to guard the door. Images of the Harrowing of Hell popular in the Middle Ages show the door of hell as the mouth of a monster breathing fire, with Jesus leading the redeemed out of it. The monster is the Biblical Leviathan, of which the Book of Job says, “Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about” (41:14). But the rest of us must wait until we pass through the door ourselves. Jung suggested that a belief in a life after death was “true” in a pragmatic sense. It is psychologically healthy, especially in the second half of life, to believe that death is not mere annihilation not just of ourselves but of all that we have loved.

Nonetheless, the pragmatic solution is far from perfect. Many people have believed in Final Solutions that they thought would “work.” There has to be some kind of touchstone. In the Paradiso, before he can enter heaven, Dante has to pass a final exam by answering three questions, on faith, hope, and love. We are not God, and do not know what is “true.” Yet we must act in this world. All we can do is try to examine our conscience as honestly as we can. Are our actions motivated by faith, hope, and love—or by selfishness and the will to power? If you don’t like the Christian references, heed the counsel of the Delphic oracle: Know thyself. This is the good form of the power of negative thinking. If these are truly our motives, Jesus said, knock. And it will be opened to you.