If I've lived once, I might as well have lived a thousand times, or a million.
The idea is not one that's ever held much water, I have to confess, yet for all that the suggestion keeps - ironically - being repeated.
There must be a probability, however small, that the life I consider to be all I have, and all I shall ever have, is but a vanishingly thin slice from the limitless block of existence held in my name; one card from a stack which numbers more than the atoms in the universe.
'Old soul' is the simple definition preferred by the South African woman who first approached the subject: such is our proximity that I'm convinced we knew each other in a previous life. The content of that statement, though, was rooted in more than idle speculation.
She genuinely believed that she could tell, by sight, those whose demeanour belied their newness, their soul as airy and light as a bubble, floating towards its punchline. "She's a new soul," she'd comment intermittently, her conviction absolute.
The more you lived, though, the more you feel the dead weight of humanity bearing down on the head, the neck, the shoulders. Old souls are, in her view, equated with weight of purpose and intensity. Old souls accumulate knowledge and are re-born with it intact in some kind of Lamarckian imperative.
I wonder if the South African view accords with the Nietzscheian one of eternal repetition; the same life repeated in an unbreakable loop, deterministically, with the same mistakes made at the same time? The same optimism and subsequent failure and contingent hopelessness - the same brutal, unavoidable death?
If I've lived once, I might as well have lived a thousand times, or a million - and I know now that at least one other person believes it to be the case.
How many consecutive lives: violent, short, bitter, unfulfilled lives, might have been terminated at the same point, in the same repetitive way as L watched on, shocked and heartbroken?
Like the amnesia victim who asks the whereabouts of a special person every few minutes, only to burst into tears when the news is broken that they have died - the cycle repeating itself indefinitely as the memory trace holding the information fades - if I have lived once, and am condemned to repetition, then L's fate is to bear witness to, and experience afresh each time, the deflection of my body up and over a car bonnet, rising fifteen feet into the air, describing a perfect arc, before falling to the ground, crumpled like a ball of paper with the sound of the vehicle's horn colouring the air.