Raphael's chronicle completes a familiar circle. A few more people who have sacrificed their souls with him finally understand, make the crucial redemptive decision and wrench themselves out of his perennial spiral flame of all consuming gut wrenching death.
Echoing Sisyphus, Raphael doesn't get to embrace the Stoic escape route. Consciousness and memory do not break down, there is no oblivion, no amnesia. Although hundreds of painkillers are sent down the gaping hatch, there is no real respite from the pain. Raphael cannot forget.
His aura, too, does not diminish, does not fade. He yet draws in hapless moths, dazzling them with the promise of the Sun outside the cave, then proceeding to feed on their blood, their innocence and their soul until a dark circled hollow shell is all that remains.
And yet, this is not your straightforward Cyrenaic hedonistic calculus. Raphael has no orgasms. Pleasure never shines its sunshine through his morning window. Instead of the archetypal satiety of the beast, Raphael's Sisyphic curse is to live the life of the moth he has fed on, to feel, in excruciating, never forgetting detail everything he has done to the people who have ever had the misfortune of loving him.
Occasionally, he even excretes the faecal remnants of his victims, and suffocating breathless in the stench of his own shit, calls it art.