Summary

The speaker reflects on how we are trapped inside our bodies. We seem almost to "strive" to return to the nothingness God made us out of because we are so self-destructive (156). In spite of man's superiority over other species, we actually are responsible for all the evil in the world. Even the evil other animals seem to have is a result of imitating or being made to act thus by human beings. The speaker concludes that humanity is now nothing.

There was, briefly, a hope from redemption from this sorrowful state. Appropriately enough, it came in the form of a girl – the speaker reflects on the irony that humankind, doomed because of a woman's sin when Eve ate the apple, could have been redeemed by another woman. However, that hope is gone now that she is dead. All that remains is religious faith.

The...