Chapter Twenty

" 'Was it really true that one could never change?' ... Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? ... Or that passion to act a part that makes us do things finer then we are ourselves. 

'Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. ... Had there been nothing more in his renunciation then that? ... No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self.

'When they entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in even dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.' "

- Oscar Wilde,  'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (selected quotes from the last chapter)

'One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.'

-Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Beyond Good and Evil'

If one is to the gain the wisdom of the immortal God, then oneself: their identity, vanity, faith, ideology, virtues and vices, morality and immorality, must die several times while still alive. Then reborn are we to explore the world upon a different path, and once again at the end of that journey we die another death. Forever the cycle, as forever as the infinite universe. At the end of eternity, the soul's accumulation of knowledge will be final, and then from the last death, the soul, will be reborn a new God, a new universe, into which we are born again to once again begin another eternal journey of self exploration.