No feeling, all knowing

More from Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat.

"I am beyond all pain and sin," he says to me. "But do you feel anything?" I ask. "Is that what it means to be free of this, that you no longer feel?" Not misery, not thirst, no ecstacy? It is interesting to me in these moments that our concept of heaven is one of ecstacy. The joys of heaven. That our concept of hell is pain. The fires of hell. So we don't think it very good not to feel anything, do we?

And

"The idea was simply that there was somebody who knew everything, somebody who had seen everything. I did not mean by this that a Supreme Being existed, but rather that there was on earth a continual intelligence, a continual awareness. And I thought of it in practical terms that excited me and soothed me simultaneously. There was an awareness of what it had been like in Massilia six centuries ago when the first Greek traders came, an awareness of what it had been like in Egypt when Cheops built the pyramids. Somebody knew what the peasants said to each other in their little farmhouse outside Athens right before the Spartans brought down the walls.

My idea of who or what it was, was vague. But I was comforted by the notion that nothing spiritual--and knowing was spiritual--was lost to us. That there was this continuous knowing..."