These undated notes appear to be Joe’s parsing of William Empson’s poem, This Last Pain for teaching purposes.  Unusually, he kept them.

(Thanks to Philip Marsden for this clue). 

The most exquisite torment devised by the ancient Church Fathers was the realization by the damned of the full extent of the joys of Heaven without being able to share them. Since in my view heaven does not exist, this punishment transferred to an earthly context is the total extent of human bliss and torment.

Man can be imagined as a housemaid looking through a keyhole at the pleasure enjoyed by the soul. In a way this induces a feeling of relief for he knows that because the religious key which used to be assumed to open the door between the world of matter or of spirit has been lost he will never be able to pass from the actual physical world to an actual world of the beyond, though the vision of an albeit imaginary beyond is always open to him. However, to take Wittgenstein’s dictum that, “A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is a thought,” what is thinkable is possible too to a false conclusion – the fact that you exist and are obviously not the sort of person who could have been imagined did you not exist is a case in point – one might well be in danger of imagining that the mere fact of being able to imagine a metaphysical truth would be enough to make it an objective reality, and we might well forget the self-deception we legitimately practised in the first place.

As the crackling of thorns under a pot so is the laughter of a fool. And though you weave them into a mocking crown of thorns they are no more a crown than was Christ’s crown of thorns. The fool who watches such crowns trying to boil a kettle thinks that the kettle boils. The wise man is aware that the sound he hears is the crackling of the thorns and not the genuine song of the boiling kettle.

Thorns at any rate like man himself turn to a fine ash which can cleanse the pot though it doesn’t fill it. Those who choose to burn themselves up by abandoning the safety of the pan can at any rate console themselves by the cleansing properties of recklessness.

All those expansive dreams which enable man to make the most of life are the reflections of his own desires projected onto empty space. I am asserting then that the only reality is the little transparency which man has himself manufactured.

These can be made by yourself to your own specifications or they may be bought and from all reputable stockists and as we enjoy life more fully by the reflection of their light back on our own festivities it is appropriate that we do not constantly remind ourselves of where the slides came from in the first place.

The most sensible course then is to believe what decency and common sense prompt us to accept as reasonable working fictions and act out that ceremonious way of life that can only be sustained by such inward delusions, constructing a formal dwelling-place for the occupation of pleasing spiritual delusions which having once been believed in as real are now taken symbolically or cherished for their comforting ability to preserve the reassuring things of life.

Join me then in the real miracle – a paradoxical miracle since imaginary gods are more real than real ones and produce imaginary gifts  more satisfying than reality – and accept the reality of the impossible, constructing a modus vivendi in the teeth of the apparent disappointment at the absence of concrete existence of supernatural objects.