Divesting oneself so totally of the customary feelings of alienation and distrust that the subsequent acceptance was intellectually orgasmic.

If goodness does exist, then I'm the opposite of it. I'm evil, and I revel in it.

Delicious it was, the hatred between us, or so I thought. Such unfamiliar excitement, to have him there to ridicule and despise.

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.

An accidental chaos blindly serving up the unaccountable beauty he now saw.

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence, he said, to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost.

In a daze, I saw him stretch out his arms to me. It struck me that never in all my life had I beheld anyone quite as beautiful as he was, and it was not merely the sum of his physical attributes, it was the pure serenity, the essence that I perceived with my innermost soul. A lovely euphoria came over me as he spoke.