You do not guess, either, how
much of time has passed already since you came here--it seems to you
like yesterday, no doubt, since you last suffered death. To meet loss
and sorrow upon earth, without either comfort or hope, is one of the
finest of lessons. When we are there, we must live blindly, and if we
here could make our presence known at once to the friends we leave
behind, it would be all too easy. It is in the silence of death that its
virtue lies."
"Yes," I said, "I do not desire to return. This is all too wonderful. It
is the freshness and sweetness of it all that comes home to me. I do
not desire to think of the body, and, strange to say, if I do think of
it, the times that I remember gratefully are those when the body was
faint and weary. The old joys and triumphs, when one laughed and loved
and exulted, seem to me to have something ugly about them, because one
was content, and wished things to remain for ever as they were. It was
the longing for something different that helped me; the acquiescence was
the shame."
VI
One day I said to Amroth, "What a comfort it is to find that there is no
religion here!"
"I know what you mean," he said.
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