He understood suffering now and the purpose of suffering. In an almost totally insentient cosmos only human feeling is interesting or relevant to what the soul searches for. There is nothing else salient in the whole tract of limitless time, and suffering is simply one means of carving a design upon an area of time, of charging with human meaning each separate moment of time. Suffering is the most expensive of human feelings, but it is the most intense and most precious of them, because suffering most efficiently humanizes the unfeeling universe. Not merely the shape of his own life taught him this, but the history of all lives, for from here he perceived with a dispassionate humor the whole of human destiny.
Metaphor amused him—and this was necessary, for in this place metaphor was a part of substance. Here he had no properly physical form apart from metaphor. And now it seemed his task to find and take his likeness in every possible form in the universe; he was to become a kind of catalogue of physical existence and of the gods. There were metaphors for everything: sometimes all his past life appeared to him in the image of a gleaming snail track over a damp garden walk; or a black iron cube, two inches square; or a shred of discolored cuticle; or a frayed shoelace.
No regret and no anger in him, no nostalgia for the painful limits he had metamorphosed out of. He was filled with an unrepressed motiveless benevolence. He contemplated with joy the unity of himself and what surrounded him. He deliberated what form his self should take now, thinking in a tuneless dreaming fashion of every possible guise. Galactic ages must have passed before he finally gave over and took the form of Leviathan. Peter took the form of the great fish, a glowing shape some scores of light-years in length. He was filled with calm; and joyfully bellowing, he wallowed and sported upon the rich darkness that flows between the stars.
END
Dagon Page 14