Book Ten: The Book of the Double Twilight, Canto II: The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal.
Death disdains the gods of the mental and vital worlds calling it all a snare. He discards the ideal as a malady of the mind sown in the human heart by the gods. He disdains love as merely a chemic product of matter, a temporary hallucination of thought and feeling that can never last. Death proclaims himself to be the one and ultimate Truth and his gospel of the futility of human life and love as the only thing that one must know. He proclaims that it is in his being and nowhere else that souls find rest and peace. Savitri stands steadfast in her love for Satyavan and refuses to let love die or accept a lesser fate of transient happiness by turning to another man or even a god. Her will firm as a rock demands from Death Satyavan and Satyavan alone.
