“You may be wrong there,” I said. “Of course in the beginning you will say the word but I think in time, properly managed, everyone will accept it on the strength of evidence and statement, responding to the chain of forces you have set in motion.” Yet for all the glibness with which I spoke, I did not really believe that Cave would prove to be more than an interesting momentary phenomenon whose “truth” about death might, at best, contribute in a small way to the final abolition of those old warring superstitions which had mystified and troubled men for twenty dark centuries. A doubt which displayed my basic misunderstanding of our race’s will to death and, worse, to a death in life made radiant by false dreams, by desperate adjurations. But that evening we spoke only of a bright future: “To begin again is the important thing,” I said. “Christianity, though strong as an organization in this country, is weak as a force because, finally, the essential doctrine is not accepted by most of the people: the idea of a man-like God dispensing merits and demerits at time’s exotic end.” “We are small,” said Cave. “In space, on this tiny planet, we are nothing. Death brings us back to the whole. We lose this instant of awareness, of suffering, like spray in the ocean: there it forms ... there it goes, back to the sea.” “I think people will listen to you because they realize now that order, if there is any, has never been revealed, that death is the end of personality even for those passionate, self-important 'I’s’ who insist upon a universal deity like themselves, carefully presented backwards in order not to give the game away.” “How dark, how fine the grave must be! only sleep and an end of days, an end of fear: the end of fear in the grave as the 'I’ goes back to nothing....” “How wonderful life will be when men no longer fear dying! When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity that we have met life. No longer will children’s minds be twisted by evil, demanding, moralizing gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That’s it: life is the villain to those maniacs who preach reward in death: grace and eternal bliss ... or dark revenge....” “Neither revenge nor reward, only the not-knowing in the grave which is the same for all....” “And without those inhuman laws, what societies we might build! Take the morality of Christ. Begin there, or even earlier with Plato or earlier yet with Zoroaster ... take the best ideas of the best men and should there be any disagreement as to what is best, use life as the definition, life as the measure: what contributes most to the living is the best.” “But the living is soon done and the sooner done the better. I envy those who have already gone....”