I insert a lengthy quote from page 301 of the paperback version: “…with that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words. A great Being or Power was travelling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheelan a rail; it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought. he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saw, I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and seen still more, and I should probably have died.” This was the dream of a woman taking ether for a minor operation.

This dream stresses God’s power rather than His love, as in the Book of Job. Perhaps He has to assert His power as opposed to the Devil’s power. (He has to rise to the challenge of the wager with Satan.) He won in Job, but lost in “The Son of Rosemary”. Maybe the powers are almost equal, and frequent replays of “mega-chess” are necessary. Yet each round takes place at the cost of human sUffering. This is why there is evil in the world. There is no love here, by either God or Satan. Humans are the pawns on the chessboard of the principalities and superpowers. But if this is true, there is no difference between Good and Evil, between God and the Devil. without love – why choose one or the other?

But there are, other aspects in this passage. The pain brings supernatural knowledge to humans who serve as the pawns of the Superpowers. Perhaps the knowledge, though fleeting, is worth more than love, more than happiness, and must be paid for by pain. (I remember a story of the priso~ ner tortured to death by lying on a bed of nails that gradually penetrated his body; he was seen to have a face of ecstasy just before he died. Each nail communicated more knowledge. )

Pain is often the apex of pleasure, as the aurora precedes a migraine headache. Pleasure can be as intense as pain, as in sexual orgasm. Pleasure and pain impulses travel along the same neural pathways, or are close neighbours. “Let this cup pass from me”? But perhaps not. Drink from the cup of agony and ecstasy, down to the dregs. “My cup overfloweth.” For this cup is the Holy Grail, full of blood and wine, red as the sunset at the end of life.

I want to KNOW, like Faust, at the cost of my soul.