It's all we have. Death fattens us to dine on us. The maggots are the minstrels at his feast. The prose is highly charged, a joy to read. Life for the fire is someone else's death.
Eternity is ever-changing matter.
It does not count. There are no gods, no design. This is presented as ultimate truth. There's a certain irony in the fact that ultimately he lets superstition have the better of Joseph and Celice. When the famous aural phenomenon of Baritone Bay finally sounds, it is numinous, like the sound of the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India .