“Everyone believes in God – especially atheists and suicides. Absence and escape are the surest roads unto Him. Reveling in his nonexistence and freeing oneself from his grasp evokes a potent combination of serenity and ecstasy. Heresy and damnation are the froth of spiritual experience. In the desperation to occupy an island paradise, both sides of the autonomic nervous system are mutually stimulated; a response alien to the orthodox aisle-shuffler, transported by each emotion only in succession. Immortality’s pariahs revel in a level of heightened sensation hitherto achievable only by cloistered monks and hermits in the wilderness; they are the modern monastics. It is these self-cancelling effects of the rebel’s rapturous profanity that explain his paralysis-by-apathy. His first duty after casting off religion being to live in society, he is too engrossed in his independence to contribute towards its ends.”