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Updated: June 28, 2025
The sin against the Spirit is to doubt the Spirit, and the sin against life is not to use it generously and freely; we are happiest if we love others well enough to give our life to them; but it is better to use life for ourselves than not to use it at all." One day I said to Amroth, "Are there no rules of life here?
Why do we have to go and come, up and down, backwards and forwards, in this absurd way, as if we were still in the body? Why not just slip off the leads, and fly down over the crags like a pair of pigeons? It all seems to me so terribly material." Amroth looked at me with a smile. "I don't advise you to try," he said. "Why, little brother, of course we are just as limited here in these ways.
But " and she burst into tears. "Come, come," said Amroth cheerfully, "we must not go back to the old days, and behave as if there were partings and funerals. I will give you five minutes alone to say good-bye. Lucius, we must start," and, turning to me, he said, "Meet us in five minutes by the oak-tree in the road." They went out, Lucius kissing Cynthia's hand in silence.
"Yes," said Amroth, "all those things have to be made pleasant, or to appear so; otherwise no one could submit to the discipline at all; but of course the pleasure only got in the way of the thought and of the happiness; it was not what one saw, tasted, smelt, felt, that one desired, but the real thing behind it; even the purest thing of all, the sight and contact of one whom one loved, let us say, with no sensual passion at all, but with a perfectly pure love; what a torment that was desiring something which one could not get, the real fusion of feeling and thought!
He was left at the doors of a great barrack-like like building, and Amroth told me he was to be employed as an officer, very much in the same way as the young man who was sent to conduct me away from the trial; and I felt what a good officer Lucius would make smart, prompt, polite, and not in the least sentimental.
Then I said to him as we went down through the terraced garden, and saw the inmates wandering about, lost in dreams, "This must be a sad place to live in, Amroth!" "No, indeed," said he, "I do not think that there are any happier than those who have the charge here.
There was no hope about it all, no suggestion of prayer, nothing but blank and unadulterated suffering. Amroth drew me back into the tower, and motioned me to the next balcony. Again I went out. The sight that I saw was almost more terrible than the first, because the prisoner here, penned in a similar enclosure, was more restless, and seemed to suffer more acutely.
So I lay for a long time half dreaming and half swooning; till at last life seemed to come back suddenly to me, and I sat up. Amroth was holding me in his arms close to the spot from which I had sprung. "Have I been dreaming?" I said. "Was it here? and when? I cannot remember. It seems impossible, but was I told to jump down? What has happened to me? I am confused."
Had they passed out of my life? I felt bewildered. Amroth laid a hand on my arm and smiled again. "No, you came near to some of them again. Do you not remember another life in which you loved a friend with a strange love, that surprised you by its nearness? He had been your child long before; and one never quite loses that." I saw in a flash the other life he spoke of.
"A few come from universities," said Amroth, "but they are not as a rule really learned men. They are more the sort of people who subscribe to libraries, and belong to local literary societies, and go into a good many subjects on their own account.
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