There
were three
possible ways of punishing man for
the Fall: the mildest was the way
actually used, expulsion from
Paradise; the second was destruction of
Paradise; the third – and this would
have been the most terrible
punishment of all – was the cutting off of life everlasting and leaving everything else as it was.
Franz Kafka, The Third
Notebook from The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Cambridge, Exact Change, 1991
