Forgetting he was in the girl’s presence and not chatting with one of his cohorts, the general let slip a smile, but then regained his composure.
‘Martello’s suicidal instinct was caused by his piety: he was incapable of giving his life any meaning, and lacked the willpower to find it, which flung open the doors of the occult. He was tormented by the quest to find the meaning to the sum of all these elements. This was the question that plagued him, and he found the other side alluring simply because it offered him the false promise of an answer – even though the other side, by which Martello was both charmed and repelled, confusing that backwater society with a terrestrial paradise, only offered a sure path to death. What good did it serve to keep obsessively poring over all those insigni
