"Only, friend, only?"
"I always thought, that only the soul remained—the soul that flies into heaven; but the body that goes into the grave, the image that decays—anyhow, it cannot move without the soul—cannot rise again."
"Well said!" he praises me. "May I ever hear the like!
"I am glad," he said, "that you are book-learned; but, my friend, you have forgotten the world of illusion! You say the soul goes to heaven, into the sky—very well—but to which part? One goes into Paradise, the other into Gehenna. Paradise is for the souls of the righteous, Gehenna for the souls of the wicked. The one, for his good deeds, receives a share of Leviathan, of Behemoth, wine of the ages,—the other, for his sins, boiling pitch; but that only means reward and punishment, and why reward and punishment? Because so long as a man lives, he has a free choice. If he wishes to do what is good, he does it, if to do evil, he does evil, and as he makes his bed, ha? so he lies.
"But what is the sentence passed when a man was no man, when his life was no life, and he did nothing, neither good nor evil, because he could not do anything? He had no choice, and he slept away his life and lived in a dream. What is such a soul entitled to? Gehenna? What for? It never so much as killed a fly. Paradise? For what? It never dipped a hand in cold water to gain it."
"What does become of such a soul?"
"Nothing! It goes on living in a world of illusion, it does not detach itself from the body; but just as it dreamt before that it lived on the earth, so it dreams now that it lives in the earth!
"No one in our town ever really died, because no one ever really lived! No one did either good or evil, there were no sinners and no righteous—only sleepy-heads and souls in a world of illusion. When such a sleepy-head is laid in the grave, it remains a sleepy-head—only in another lodging—that's all.
"And so dying with us was a perfect comedy! Because if a feather was put under the nose of a live man, would he stir to brush it away? Not he! And the same with a fly. They left off troubling about Parnosseh—they simply left off troubling about anything at all!
"So it went on.... There are many towns like it, and when it happens, as it has happened with us, that a corpse creeps out of its grave, it doesn't begin to remember that it has made its last confession of sins and drawn its last breath. No sooner have the potsherds fallen from its eyes than it goes straight to the house-of-study, to the bath, or else home to supper—it remembers nothing about having died!"