Those feelings of desolation came crushingly close, reviving long forgotten, only half-remembered thoughts of suicide: suicide as a rational man’s only method of maintaining honor in a world without rules, in which each species survives only by being craftier than another. These realizations, so long buried, were bad enough. With them came the shame of a condemnation I could not escape, for I saw that in my investigations of rats and in my experiments with them, I took out my revenge against the world by literally mutilating the brains of rodents; out of sheer rage. And with this understanding, I fell down on the couch, covered my face with my hands, and wept.

A fine way for a professor of psychology to act! So I tried to examine my own feelings in order to clear my mind. Nothing worked. And nothing could erase my sense of outrage that Ram-Ram and myself were turning into characters in a book—a book written by my fingers, but not by my mind. And I wondered: How could that be an accident? I still couldn’t see any purpose in the entire affair, yet the wild series of crazy events seem to hint of some strange order that exists completely outside the usual kind of purpose or design.

Why did I care if Will committed suicide? Or, for that matter, if Lydia decided to be born again or not? Yet I suddenly realized that I cared, deeply, and that my anxiety about both issues had been growing steadily, even though I’d resolutely tried to banish such thoughts whenever they came unbidden into my mind. So I asked myself another question: Did Lydia in some way remind me of Sarah? Did I, in my own grotesque imagination, suppose that the birth of Sarah’s child was somehow dependent upon Lydia’s decision to be reborn? The utter nonsense of such musings strike me with the deepest scorn, yet I cannot escape realizing that I have, indeed, made such impossible identifications and associations.

Moreover, I don’t trust Lydia’s decision to be reborn as given in the last chapter. She could change her mind overnight. I’m led to think that there can be no logic at all to these imaginative dissertations of mine, for I also imagine that Sarah and Bianka are both waiting for childbirth while (oh, dear Lord) the stubborn Lydia still dallies. At the same time, an irrational enough hope seizes me, as if Lydia’s pilgrimage might yet lead to the discovery of life’s purposes; and this despite the fact that I do not admit the existence of the soul (Oversoul Seven to the contrary). And from these skeins of irrationality, how can I possibly have any hopes?