He would sometimes recall, as if it had happened to another person, the compulsion to press close to death, to feel the purity that followed. He had always been respectful of the inner conquests of men and the rarefied, ascetic world they occurred in. He had traveled that world for a while, accomplishing he was not sure what, unless it was that he had learned a little of silence and perhaps devotion. Friends on the outside were always asking why he stayed in, or telling him he was wasting himself. He had never been able to give an answer.
