“But if I want something new, something beautiful that I haven’t seen before, can’t I have it?”
“Of course you can have it. Only, just at first, until your own imagination develops, you’ll have to come to me or Turner or Michael Angelo to make it for you.”
“And will these things that you and Turner and Michael Angelo make for me be permanent?”
“Absolutely, unless we unmade them. And I don’t think we should do that against your will. Anyhow, though we can destroy our own works we can’t destroy each other’s, that is to say, reduce them to their ultimate constituents. What’s more, we shouldn’t dream of trying.”
“Because old motives don’t work here. Envy, greed, theft, robbery, murder, or any sort of destruction, are unknown. They can’t happen. Nothing alters matter here but mind, and I can’t will your body to come to pieces so long as you want it to keep together. You can’t destroy it yourself as you can other things you make, because your need of it is greater than your need of other things.
“We can’t thieve or rob for the same reason. Things that belong to us belong to our state of mind and can’t be torn away from it, so that we couldn’t remove anything from another person’s state into our own. And if we could we shouldn’t want to, because each of us can always have everything he wants. If I like your house or your landscape better than my own, I can make one for myself just like it. But we don’t do this, because we’re proud of our individualities here, and would rather have things different than the same— By the way, as you haven’t got a house yet, let alone a landscape, you’d better share ours.”
“That’s very good of you,” Mr. Spalding said. He was thinking of Oxford. Oxford. Quiet rooms in Balliol. He seemed to hesitate.
“If you’re still sitting on that old grievance of yours, I tell you, once for all, Spalding, I’m not going to express any regret. I’m _not_ sorry, I’m glad I took Elizabeth away from you. I made her more happy than unhappy even on earth. And please notice it’s I who got her into heaven, not you. If she’d stayed with you and hated you, as she would have done, she couldn’t have got in.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” said Mr. Spalding. “I was only wondering where I could put my landscape.”