What we can say is that everything in our life happens as if we entered it bearing a burden of obligations contacted in an earlier life; there is nothing in the conditions of our life on this earth to make us feel any obligation to do good, to be scrupulous, even to be polite…All these obligations which do not derive their force from the here-and-now seem to belong to a different world founded on goodness, conscientiousness, sacrifice, a world quite different from this one, which we leave to be born on to this earth, and to which we shall perhaps return, to live under those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we carried their teaching within us without knowing who had written it there, these laws to which we are brought closer by any profound work of the intellect, and which are invisible — if ever wholly invisible — only to fools.
You’re so close, Narrator.