“And these people were once men?”
“Presumably.”
“And then they have escaped altogether from the sorrows of life?”
“Say, rather,” he answered, “that they have escaped to the sorrows of life. The essence of life is sorrow.”
“It does not seem so, from your picture,” I said.
“That is simple because my picture is not understood. Every one of these beings of whom I speak bears in his bosom a pain for which there are no words; every one of them—there are countless numbers of them, living each in my consciousness as the voice of one instrument lives in a symphony—each one is a Titan spirit, wrestling day and night without end, without possibility of respite, and bearing on his shoulders a universal load of woe. In no way could you imagine one better than as a soldier in the crisis of the battle, panting, and blind with pain, dying amid the glory of his achievement.”
“And such a life!” I cried “Why do they live it?”
“They lived it because it demands with the voice of all their being to be lived; because the presence of it is rapture and unutterable holiness; because it will allow no questions, because it is instant, imperative, and final—it will be lived!”
I sat in silence. “Do I gather from your words,” I asked, “that immortality is not one of the privileges of this race?”
He smiled again. “The spiritual life,” he said, “does not begin until the thought of immortality is flung away. A man’s duty looms up before him—and in his weakness he will not do it, but puts the fruition of his life into another world, where the terms are not so hard!”