"The Charm of the Unseen":
"Within the finite span of his life,
the wise man must feel the same comfort
that God feels within His eternity".
Seneca
No matter how much wisdom one accumulates, the landscapes of an afterlife world will not be revealed to him. The beyond exerts exclusively the charm of its obscurity, open to any conceivable or artistic interpretation.
Many may engage with it, e.g., theologians, ethnologists, painters, or linguists (who trace the etymology of paradise to the Aramaic "pardez" - the enclosed gardens - and of hell to the ancient Greek "klao" - the punitive amputations), yet no cartographer raises the issue of mapping it. Its "land registry" remains unseen, and those who trust in posthumous acquaintance with it (even cartographers) are obliged to wait. Probably without impatience. But even those who do not trust it equally partake in the charm of the unseen, marveling at the trust of the former. This is where Arkas excels, in possible or improbable versions. Playing with our relative, insurmountable ignorance.
"Tell me, angel, why do you leave humans in anxiety and fear?" wonders the protagonist of the series, urging that some clues about humanity's posthumous prospects be finally offered. Developing his argument, he even refers to wise men who, to solve the mystery of death, "consume their entire lives and in the end, when they die, four crows take them away, and they have no idea where they are being taken". To give the angel the opportunity to conclude that: "the wise do not know where they are going!"
However, the readers of Arkas, wiser than the wise, learn in every detail the bureaucratic stagnations of paradise, the boredom and favoritism, or its compromises with stereotypes, as well as the inquisitive experiments in hell, for inventing new tortures! As we learn, thanks to the sketches, that paradise has an idyllic countryside, with scattered columns and cypresses, while hell has gloomy tunnels and medieval vaults. And if paganism is thus combined with orthodoxy and Catholicism, it is not surprising. Even the angel admits that, seeing nature with "colors that combine green with purple and fuchsia with parrot green", "camels with crooked necks and humps" or "hippopotamuses with giant mouths and tiny eyes", we praise "the unsurpassed power and infinite wisdom of God", but we maintain reservations about His taste. With so much kitsch in this world, then, why not in the other?
However, life before sometimes rivals the peak moments of life after. I remember the argument I once heard, that "since no one has come from the other world to say that nothing exists, therefore something exists"! With the same reasoning, since no one has seen Arkas, therefore Arkas exists! And just as after Galileo, religion found a way to reconcile with science, declaring that: "the intention of the Holy Spirit is not to teach us how things are in heaven, but how to go to it", Arkas, thanks to expressive sketches and his euphoric humor, manages to do both.