greenstorm | My Book Says:

Happy and angry. Happily angry. Everything, all at once. That's life, boy. You just keep getting fuller, until you burst and Allah takes you and casts your soul into another life later on. And so everything just keeps getting fuller.

It also says:

Looking back down the vale of the ages at the endless recurrence of their reincarnations, before they were forced to drink the vials of forgetting and all became obscure to them again, they could see no pattern at all to their efforts; if the gods had a plan, or even a set of procedures, if it was not just mindless repetition, time itself nothing but a succession of chaoses, no one could discern it; and the story of their transmigrations, rather than being a narrative without death had become instead a veritable charnel house. Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting?

And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, not in the experience of it nor in the contemplation of it afterwards; and their anthologist must tell their stories honestly, must deal in reality, or else the stories mean nothing. And it is crucial that the stories mean something.