I do not know what sort of person I was in my previous life, the one preceding this life. I was probably someone of no consequence, some marginal person with little talent and less ambition, someone who shrugged at humanity's greatest achievements and could not comprehend the most significant of our ideas. I probably died an old man having worked all his life in some factory, never having seen a need for books or fed his mind, with children who had forgotten him and a wife who looked at him as a burden so long as he would live. What sort of person would I like to be in my next life? Would I like to be filled with dreams & ambitions & a desire to really make life worth living? Would I like to go through that stage of innocence I was in 10 years ago, looking out at the wide world in amazement, certain of the glory to come? Oh I would rather be born in some Guatemalan shithole, be born to a father with the broken psychology I have now, be born to a suicide of a mother, than to go through such arrogant hope I had as a young man again--I would rather grow up knowing I will never be anything of consequence, nip the arrogance of dreams in the bud, than to have those bright eyes of my youth all over, knowing, knowing, knowing that life is a miracle, I am no less than a Ghandi-to-be, and there are a thousand ways in which life could turn out to be the greatest & most beautiful experience there ever was--as if Ghandi's hunger strikes weren't dismal, and his work not all in vain. Yes--and immortality is a terrible possibility--to live life all over is a terrible thought--and yet to sleep forever in the grave, to never exist again--that too seems awful, that too seems tragic. To live, or to be nothing forevermore--I fear them both, and hope for neither. This is what led me in my Christian days to hope there was such a thing as a third alternative--to exist, and yet not suffer--heaven. But now I know that such is simply an absurdity--and so I am left in a dilemma--I do not want to exist; I do not want to be snuffed out into eternal darkness--I am like an old man in a corner of a dark room, looking out into the black blindness, fearing everything. I am a fearful jellyfish floating on the sea, its tentacles half-retreating and half-going at the monsters of the deep--are they food, or will they eat me? I am a pale old man crying out into a dark empty house--"Who's there?" And in my darkest moments I know that my lack of faith is the very definition of the fallen man, the one whose eternal abode is not life, not death, but the hell under the earth, where we shall never cease from cursing Allah, where we shall be tortured forevermore not by God but by our own lack of faith in everything, our own lack of love for ourselves. And after a thousand years of torture I shall be a man no more, human no more, but some sort of suffering devil, a mass of tortured flesh twisted into the monstrosity of it-that-is-its-own-hell.