The eternity turns out to have been only a minute. There is nothing whirling and tumultuous about it. It is a calm and placid beatitude. Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every difficult question that presents a point of contention for theologians, and brings despair to thoughtful men, becomes clear and transparent.
Every contradiction is reconciled.
Man has surpassed the gods. Like a poor profligate who sucks and bites the withered breasts of some well-seasoned trull, we snatch in passing at clandestine joys and squeeze the oldest orange harder yet. Wriggling in our brains like a million worms, a demon demos holds its revels there, and when we breathe, the Lethe in our lungs trickles sighing on its secret course. Her garments writhe and glisten like long snakes obedient to the rhythm of the wands by which a fakir wakens them to grace. Like both the desert and the desert sky insensible to human suffering, and like the ocean's endless labyrinth she shows her body with indifference.