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life. The beliefs, hopes, principles, convictions that sustained our civilization are gone. And they won’t be resuscitated. Take that on faith for the time being. No, henceforth and for a long time to come we’re going to live in the mind. That means destruction … self-destruction. If you ask why I can only say—because man was not made to live by mind alone. Man was meant to live with his whole being. But the nature of this being is lost, forgotten, buried. The purpose of life on earth is to discover one’s true being—and to live up to it! But we won’t go into that. That’s for the distant future. The problem is—meanwhile. And that’s where I come in. Let me put it to you as briefly as possible … All that we have stifled, you, me, all of us, ever since civilization began, has got to be lived out. We’ve got to recognize ourselves for what we are. And what are we but the end product of a tree that is no longer capable of bearing fruit. We’ve got to go underground, therefore, like seed, so that something new, something different, may come forth. It isn’t time that’s required, it’s a new way of looking at things. A new appetite for life, in other words. As it is, we have but a semblance of life. We’re alive only in dream. It’s the mind in us that refuses to be killed off. The mind is tough—and far more mysterious than the wildest dreams of theologians. It may well be that there is nothing but mind … not the little mind we know, to be sure, but the great Mind in which we swim, the Mind which permeates the whole universe. Dostoievsky, let me remind you, had amazing insight not only into the soul of man but into the mind and spirit of the universe. That’s why it’s impossible to shake him off, even though, as I said, what he represents is done for.
    Here I had to interrupt. Excuse me, I said, but what did Dostoievsky represent, in your opinion?
    I can’t answer that in a few words. Nobody can. He gave us a revelation, and it’s up to each one of us to make what he can of it. Some lose themselves in Christ. One can lose himself in Dostoievsky too. He takes you to the end of the road … Does that mean anything to you?
    Yes and no.
    To me, said Stymer, it means that there are no possibilities to-day such as men imagine. It means that we are thoroughly deluded—about everything. Dostoievsky explored the field in advance, and he found the road blocked at every turn. He was a frontier man, in the profound sense of the word. He took up one position after another, at every dangerous, promising point, and he found that there was no issue for us, such as we are. He took refuge finally in the Supreme Being.
    That doesn’t sound exactly like the Dostoievsky I know, said I. It has a hopeless ring to it.
    No, it’s not hopeless at all. It’s realistic—in a superhuman sense. The last thing Dostoievsky could possibly have believed in is a hereafter such as the clergy give us.
    All religions give us a sugar-coated pill to swallow. They want us to swallow what we never can or will swallow—death. Man will never accept the idea of death, never reconcile himself to it … But I’m getting off the track. You speak of man’s fate. Better than any one, Dostoievsky understood that man will never accept life un-questioningly until he is threatened with extinction. It was his belief, his deep conviction, I would say, that man may have everlasting life if he desires it with his whole heart and being. There is no reason to die, none whatever. We die because we lack faith in life, because we refuse to surrender to life completely … And that brings me to the present, to life as we know it to-day. Isn’t it obvious that our whole way of life is a dedication to death? In our desperate efforts to preserve ourselves, preserve what we have created, we bring about our own death. We do not surrender to life, we struggle to avoid dying. Which means not that we have lost faith in God but that we have lost faith in life