Perelandra

by C.S. Lewis

Ransom never could make up his mind whether it was a trick or whether a decaying psychic energy that had once been Weston were indeed fitfully and miserably alive within the body that sat there beside him. He discovered that any hatred he had once felt for the Professor was dead. He found it natural to pray fervently for his soul.Yet what he felt for Weston was not exactly pity. Up till that moment, whenever he had thought of Hell, he had pictured the lost souls as being still human; now, as the frightful abyss which parts ghosthood from manhood yawned before him, pity was almost swallowed up in horror — in the unconquerable revulsion of the life within him from positive and selfconsuming Death. If the remains of Weston were, at such moments, speaking through the lips of the Un-man, then Weston was not now a man at all.The forces which had begun, perhaps years ago, to eat away his humanity had now completed their work.The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces. Only a ghost was left — an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odour of decay.‘And this,’ thought Ransom,‘might be my destination; or hers.’