Paradise-Lost, Regained, who knows?

     I read about the jailhouse suicide of a serial murderer who traveled across the country, chose his victims at random,  and  in the case in Vermont viciously assaulted a couple  in their own home and slaughtered them.  This reminded me that, stowed away in the bottom of my bookshelf, is an "Atlantic Monthly"  magazine which has within it a story that I read back in 1997.  The story has troubled me ever since, in a vague way, which only means I couldn't fully recall the horror of it.  Yesterday, after 15 years, a measure of years which is astounding to me, and horrible in its own way, I overcame my  reluctance to reread such a loathsome tale, blew the dust off the magazine, and took a look.
    "Puttermesser in Paradise"  a short story by Cynthia Ozick opens like this:   "It happens that in the several seconds before we die, the well of the ribs opens, and a crystal pebble is thrown in; then there is a tiny splash, no more than the chirp of a droplet.  This seeming pebble is the earthly equal of what scientists call a black hole---a dead sun that has collapsed into itself, shrinking from density to deeper density, until it is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.  Until it is less than infinitesimal."
  The end is like this:   "Puttermesser.......walks through the white ash of Paradise, herself a shadow though casting none, and longs for the plain green earth.----She has seen into (paradise) so this is what she sings:  At the point of a knife I lost my life....If I were alive I wouldn't fault anything under the heavenly vault.   Better never to have loved at all.  Better never to have risen than had a fall.  Oh, bitter, bitter, bitter, butter knife."
     I found the story just as I remembered it, though at the time, I was not elderly, like Mrs. Puttermesser.  Now I relate to it more deeply, hoping to avoid or bypass in some way the conclusion she drew about her life, examined during her murder: the secret meaning  of Paradise  is that it, too, is Hell.
    I am replacing the magazine on the bookshelf.  I might read it again someday.