"And yet... and yet..." said I to my Teacher, when all the shapes and the singing had passed some distance away into the forest, "even now I am not quite sure. Is it really tolerable that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?"

"Would you rather he still had the power of tormenting her? He did it many a day and many a year in their earthly life."

"Well, no. I suppose I don't want that that."

"What then?"

"I hardly know, Sir. What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one's soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved."

"Ye see it does not."

"I feel in a way that it ought to."

"That sounds very merciful, but see what lurks behind it."

"What?"

"The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven."

"I don't know what I want, Sir."

This dialogue follows the most compelling (to me) scene in C. S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce". A saved woman is trying to coax a man she knew in life to join her in heaven while the narrator and his guide look on. She clearly acts in such a way as to reveal a preference that the man join her. But nothing he does, not even remaining in Hell for all eternity, makes a bit of difference to her emotional state.

Do I want her miserable? No. Do I think she cares, really cares about the man she's trying to help? Well... no. I don't think that's what "care" means; she lacks empathy for him. I recently acted in such a way as to get myself a baked potato. I don't really care, in the deep and meaningful way I care about other people, about having gotten a baked potato - and I'm not even devoid of potato-related emotional feelings, I would have been disappointed if it had caught fire and I was pleased when it turned out nicely.

Do I like being sad when my friends are sad? Well, no, not really, I don't have sadness-asymbolia. Would I rather not be sad when my friends are sad; do I want to deny them that power, as C. S. Lewis suggests would be only just? No! I don't want to go around helping people just because this is written somewhere on my abstract list of preferences, acting in numb glee and feeling nothing that responds to my environment.

I don't know what I want, Sir.