First Level of Hell - Limbo
Charon ushers you across the river Acheron, and you find yourself upon the brink of grief's abysmal valley. You are in Limbo, a place of sorrow without torment. You encounter a seven-walled castle, and within those walls you find rolling fresh meadows illuminated by the light of reason, whereabout many shades dwell. These are the virtuous pagans, the great philosophers and authors, unbaptised children, and others unfit to enter the kingdom of heaven. You share company with Caesar, Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Aristotle. There is no punishment here, and the atmosphere is peaceful, yet sad.
I often thought of my years working in the military-industrial complex as being in the First Circle.....
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In the First Circle (В круге первом, V kruge pervom) is a novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn released in 1968. A fuller version of the book was published in English in 2009.
The novel depicts the lives of the occupants of a sharashka (a R&D bureau made of gulag inmates) located in the Moscow suburbs. This novel is highly autobiographical. Many of the prisoners (zeks) are technicians or academics who have been arrested under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code in Joseph Stalin's purges following the Second World War. Unlike inhabitants of other gulag labor camps, the sharashka zeks were adequately fed and enjoy good working conditions; however if they found disfavor with the authorities, they could be instantly shipped to siberia.
The title is an allusion to Dante's first circle of Hell in The Divine Comedy,[1] wherein the philosophers of Greece, and other non-Christians, live in a walled green garden. They are unable to enter Heaven, as they were born before Christ, but enjoy a small space of relative freedom in the heart of Hell.
Our defense industry is just another bloated social program riddled with all sorts of fraud, waste and abuse......