Yours of the twentieth century received and lack of contents noted. Item. You have cut out hunks of the anterior brains of monkeys and found, after the surgery, they were able to live in the jungle just as well as before. Item. You have hacked out hunks of the posterior cerebral tissue of cats with the result that they lost their instincts: they no longer tended to their kittens, fed them, or defended them. Item. Your colleagues in medicine are getting similar results with human prefrontal lobotomies. And yet--you still deny that man and his works repeat the great pattern of his instincts! You deny that his reason, his image of himself which he alone deems reasonable, is but another reflection of this same pattern in another dimension. In closing, nuts. I sent a message of truth to the theologists: Dear Fellow Compulsives: To insist you know God when you do not know logic or science is hideous. Those who say they know God and yet reject truth, however selectively, are playing at _being_ God. And those men who play they are God, perforce use men as toys. When will you end this dreadful game? Sincerely. A time will come, I thought, when man's chief passion will be to observe and to learn dispassionately--his passions. But you won't be there, Mac. For this reason, I sent a telepathic message to the School for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, where--at long last--the professors are assembled to try to find out something to teach: Persons: Cease trying to rectify the Bhagavad-Gita by means of the Uncertainty Principle. Try algebra--since you are so much simpler than you think. Query: When will you exchange truths evenly with the Believers? So long. As I say, I nonwired this missive. I got no answer. The oscilloscope of my mind rippled sadly. Its little line ran straight, then finally shot up with further inquiry: Who sees that day is the augury of coming night? And who--looking at the darkened sky--sees it to be the daylight of a trillion suns? Who further sees the great initial in the stars themselves--the F for Freedom that I dreamed of in a dream? Whose brain will abide it all? Who will continue our Quest? And next, I felt my solitude. If any man is more alone than I in this society I would know it, for I would have met him in the spaces I inhabit. True, I've seen a few in my distances. And Ricky goes there with me sometimes--as she must. In another sense, indeed, the whole company of my contemporaries is with me and I am alone only in knowing it. For the dignity and purpose we dreamed of in the youth of this century has gone. We do our work. We mind our manners. But our young hope has been dimmed by the predictabilities. Hence we all know how temporary we are, how brief our routines, how probably it is futile to quarry or to breed, to build or to wish, to sell or to instruct, to make these civilized exertions. Camus' plague is on us; it has been here a long while. We call it materialism. Progress that excludes Man.