"But spring follows winter," I said more to quiet him than out of conviction. He may have felt this, because he smiled mournfully, and his faded features were suffused with a glorified light—the light that fills us with the awe of the infinite when we stand in the presence of the dead.
"What that spring is which follows the winter of our lives, no man knows. I think it is an eternal winter; and if a new life does blossom out of the grave, it is a fresh beginning, which grows from itself, and does not join on to an end without an end." He gazed meditatively into space. "My idea is," he continued, "that death is the only reality on earth. Life is only a seeming. Life changes at every moment and passes, death never changes and remains forever. Tell me, Herr Kreisphysikus, if men grow old, they live seventy years or a little more, and don't they stay dead a million years? Have you ever heard of anyone's living twice, or being young twice?"
It is not the first time I am called upon to notice the profundity of the old man's observations; but it never fails to surprise me.
"Have you never heard of the immortality of the soul, Herr Eichelkatz?" I asked.
"Soul, Herr Doktor? What is soul? Where is it? In what is it? How does it look? Does it fly out of the body when life is at an end? By the window? By the chimney? Through the keyhole? Has anyone ever seen it? Has someone ever felt it? Sometimes I read in the paper about spirits with whom chosen mortals talk. Do you believe it, Herr Doktor? I don't. Has such a thing ever been proved? They are meshugge or else cheats; it always turns out that way."
I had to laugh at the curt way in which he disposed of spiritualism and all its excrescences.
"Nevertheless, my dear friend," I answered, "there is probably a spiritual after-life which manifests itself in our children and grandchildren—a young spring time of life made fruitful by the impulses of our souls."
He wrapped himself more tightly in his cover. A slight shiver went through his body.
"Herr Kreisphysikus, and how about those who have no children, or those whose children go away from them, or those who do not know their own children?—through no fault of their own. Why should they be worse off than the others? What have they done that they should be extinguished forever, while the others live on forever? I don't believe it. For if I did happen to see in the world a great deal about which I had to ask myself why, still I didn't see anything that had no definite plan and no compelling cause, the good and the bad. The thing might not have pleased me, and it might have seemed bad or false, but it had a law according to which it had to be carried out."
There he was dealing with Kantian abstractions again; the categorical imperative came to him instinctively. I did not want to tire him with thinking too much, and I said: