[ WP ] You 're in hell , your punishment is to read a book that is infinite , every 1000 years the bookmark you placed in it vanishes forcing you to start from the beginning .

The book, if it can even be called such a thing, is fixed to a metal pole that rises from the center of the room. Its position on the pole can be adjusted, so that it can be read either standing or sitting. The pole serves as the book's spine, and its pages fan outwards in a perfect cylinder nearly a foot and a half across. It has no beginning and no end. Its length is impossible to estimate. The pages of the book are infinitely compressible, so that even though the book appears as a solid mass of paper, I can easily part the pages and compress them to half their size, a quarter, a third. A fraction of the book contains an arbitrary number of pages, perhaps even as many as the book itself. 
 
 At first, I felt as if my task was in fact a great blessing. The book is infinite, and contains all of human knowledge and all knowledge denied to us. It has a narrative, I am sure of that, but one so long and convoluted that I can not even begin to comprehend it. It stretches on infinitely and touches on everything. I read the history of the world and the history of a thousand worlds separate from ours. Some of the characters were fanciful, and some I faintly recognized from a past life, rendered to me in perfect detail so that I knew them more intimately than I ever did before. I read pages of utter nonsense, letters repeated seemingly at random, and then later on detailed instructions to pull meaning from from those ciphers. At those times I paged back frantically, terrified that I would no longer be able to find the previous pages, and that some portion of the book would be obscured to me forever. I read treatises on philosophy and mathematics that left me breathless with wonder, more enlightened than any human soul still alive. I read an accounting of my own soul, and the judgement that sentenced me to this fate, and found it utterly unimpeachable. 
 
 But I soon realized that where the book was infinite, I was but a speck in comparison. I could not hope to retain even a fraction of what I read. It might take a hundred years, two hundred years, but eventually even the most dazzling revelations would fade from my memory. Trying to find old pages was impossible. The pages refused to fold or tear or accept any mark. All I had to mark my place was a single bookmark, a small strip of red cloth that clung to any page I pressed it to. I could not cut it, could not tear it; it refused to stick to more than one page at a time. It was all I could do to remember where I left off before I fell asleep, my head spinning with all I had learned. I was surrounded by wonders, but could only push on ceaselessly forward. 
 
 Wonder replaced itself with hopelessness and paranoia. I considered myself utterly inadequate for the task. What was the point of having access to such knowledge when I was incapable of truly comprehending it? There were moments of dread when I sat half-convinced that there was some vital piece of information that I had forgotten, that I needed to continue. Even the first sentence I had read, when I first flipped through the book and arbitrarily chose a page to begin, even that was lost to me. I cursed and railed against myself, wishing I had burnt that sentence into my brain, repeated it to myself again and again the first thing upon waking. But instead I had allowed the beginning of the book to be lost, and now the ending seemed similarly out of reach. 
 
 I now sought only to finish the book, in hopes that I could begin to comprehend it through its completion. Centuries passed, and certain passages began to seem familiar to me, as if I had read them before. The words were just familiar enough to give me hope, unfamiliar enough to make me doubt. When I began to suspect that my task had ended, that I had finally reached where I started and found understanding, I would come across something completely foreign and be forced to read on. For centuries still that maddened hope ate away at me, gnawed at me with every page. I obsessed over the possible explanations. 
 
 If the book truly was infinite, I reasoned, it would contain every variation on every sentence. Perhaps these seeming repetitions were merely a product of having read up to this point. If one had studied the world in detail, would not everything start to seem familiar? On other days, I would conclude it was all part of my punishment. The book was shifting, the letters rearranging themselves on the page the moment I turned away, just different enough to make me doubt. The book was truly impossible to finish, warping itself simply to torment me. Or worst of all, perhaps it was merely my mind that had betrayed me. Perhaps I had read this all before, a hundred times before. Perhaps I'd gone maddened and senile with age, and could have finished my task a hundred times over if I was n't too deluded to realize it. 
 
 I sought either damnation or salvation. Instead I read on and on and on, constantly doubting myself, hating myself, hating the book. What I once found fascinating, I now viewed as some conspiracy to torment me, or alternately as an irrefutable sign of my own worthlessness. I fruitlessly sought to tear out its pages. I flipped desperately through the pages, carving notes onto my skin in futile attempts to prove or disprove my theories. I made brilliant conclusions and then the next day dismissed them as the work of a madman. The book gave me all the information I needed, confirmed and denied everything I could conceive of. I understood perfectly how this was a punishment worthy of hell 
 
 Until today. Today I woke and the bookmark was lying on the floor. For the first time in an eternity, it had slipped from the book while I slept. Standing there, staring dumbly at the red scrap of cloth on the floor, I realized I was equally lost. I could not remember even the pages I had read yesterday. I flipped through the book and found nothing familiar. All my progress had been erased. This is an unprecedented event. I have read the histories of a thousand worlds, and this is something utterly new. 
 
 It is a miracle. 
 
 Praise be to God, praise be to God. God is merciful, and even in my damned state He has seen fit to ease my suffering. My long torment is over. Today I start anew.
