Burning in Life and After Life.

As I started The Burning Journals by Brent Runyon I thought to myself who could endur such pain as lighting themselves on fire and be left cooking until dead. Since a small child I always loved playing with candles and starting fires with paper and matches but even the small burns from wax or flames on my fingers were enough to keep away from fire. Once I had the experience of the rapid spread of fire when putting alcohol onto a campsite and feeling the heat whip my face. Luckily I was never burned so much as to have skin replacement as Brent needed after his accident. As bad as being burned alive is, witnessing it can be horrifying to, just as Dante did in the Seventh Circle of Hell.

"The First Zone is for the Blasphemers, who must lie prone on a bank of sand. The falling flakes of fire keep the sand perpetually hot, ensuring that the souls burn from above and below." (Canto XIV, Spark Notes) It is Dante who goes through Hell visiting all possible circles and experiences the sight of pain and suffering. In this particular circle, the blasphemers against God are tortured by being burned in a pit of flaking fire sand. As the sinners lay there smelling their flesh and soul burn, Dante stands witness of the consequences of blasphemy. 

Now from what Brent felt for a couple of seconds, what might of felt like an eternity, would seem like paradise to those sinners being burned every moment for the rest of time. "I bring it closer to my wrist and then it goes up, all over me, eating through me everywhere. I can't breathe....I'm breathing water and smoke. I unlock the door and I open it. My hand is all black." (page 17) 

"Stop tearing. They are tearing at me. Tearing away my skin." (page 26)
His description made me cringe a little and thought about how my blisters from fires already made me tear up how would this make me feel. 

Even though both Dante's Inferno and Brent's The Burn Journals contrast each other by being fiction and non-fiction images when reading of burned bodies I always look back at that episode of CSI where they find a charcoaled body and as the camera zooms into his face his eyes open up and scarring a young boy for life, me.