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existence—individual existence—and the concomitant need for soul would be less. That might be more to the Devil’s taste: individual units functioning in relation to other individual units. Less spiritual. More mechanized. That seems to be the prevailing tendency in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—more and more interchangeable units, ready to serve a corporate machine. At the other end of it, you have the maniacal intensity of the most extreme Muslims, whose only feeling is that there’s something so wrong with this approach that it all has to be destroyed, and don’t ask questions. Once again, we are at a point in history between the rock and the hard place.

III

    Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell
    MICHAEL LENNON:
I want to ask a question about Purgatory. Do you feel some sympathy for that idea?
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    NORMAN MAILER: Some—and a fair portion of uneasiness. I will say that I expect there may be some sizable difficulties present after death, a universal Hell, perhaps, of waiting that we may all have to go through before we are born again—those of us who will be born again. I will add that there’s an automatic assumption in most people who are religious that God is not only All-Powerful but instantaneous in His action. There’s an Irish saying: “When God made time, He made a lot of it.” So God
could
be instantaneous—but why would He want to be? Nevertheless, this expectation of quick reception and quick designation for one’s afterlife is at odds with our own experience—which is that everything takes longer than we think it will. That is the accrued wisdom of most men and women after many decades of life. In the economy of human experience, there are always time-consuming episodes you didn’t anticipate. To assume that once you pass into another realm of existence things will be faster and more responsive—that is no small assumption. It’s as ungrounded as to expect that there are no destinations in the Hereafter other than Purgatory, Limbo, or Hell. Another, after all, might be God’s need to judge whether a particular soul should be reborn or might as well expire. So Purgatory might sit there as a set of possibilities with many unhappy holding tanks. God may look at three quarters of us, say, “I don’t want to make up my mind just yet,” and drop us into slow Purgatory, so to speak.
    Now, what the form of this Purgatory might be—whether it bears resemblance to a Palestinian refugee camp—I have no idea. One of the beliefs I hold is that the Hereafter is less different than we assume. We may have the same frustrations and difficulties in the afterlife—overcrowding, for example, or even, conceivably, waste. After the Holocaust, we were forced to recognize there was something absolutely murderous in our species—obviously, it was not just reserved for the Germans; there was something vastly destructive in our nature. We received this knowledge over and over again, in Russia, in China, in Africa, in some of our own actions—indeed, in Vietnam. The point I want to make is that the Holocaust may have exacted a great price from God, even greater than from us. At the core of karma is the notion that it is composed of wise judgment. What if that is not always true? In the godly assessment of each life—in the reading of the soul, so to speak, that takes place after one dies—can it be that God sometimes says, “I’m too weary to think about this now”? After all, if God is an artist, is it always necessary to make instantaneous judgments? Under certain conditions of overcrowding, literal overcrowding in eternity of the sort caused by the Holocaust or Hiroshima, Purgatory can become a vast way station.
    Let me try to expatiate on that. Given the number of people exterminated in a day during the Holocaust, the number of souls arriving in tumult, is it