You ask me how I am. I don't know what to answer considering the ups and downs that I experience. Sometimes I am full of Life and sometimes death seems to rage against me in all my members. Sometimes I kill life and sometimes it is the dead who bring me down. Sometimes I am cut off from everything through union with the Lord and sometimes I am a mixture of everything. It is a wonder for me that the Spirit of Life so lends Himself to alienation that the dead can so exercise power. But He allows this to happen in order to warn us, so that we should not breath in the odour of the dead with any longing. (L37)