disappointing finale. Surely, Julius thought, the glorious adventure of his life deserved

something more...more...more what?

A scene he had witnessed a few months ago on a Hawaiian vacation came to mind.

While hiking he had quite by chance come upon a large Buddhist retreat center and saw a

young woman walking though a circular labyrinth, constructed of small lava stones.

Reaching the center of the labyrinth she stopped and remained motionless in a lengthy

standing meditation. Julius`s knee–jerk reaction to such religious ritual was not charitable,

generally falling somewhere in the territory between ridicule and revulsion.

But, now, as he thought about that meditating young woman, he experienced softer

feelings—a flood of compassion for her and for all his fellow humans who are victims of

that freakish twist of evolution that grants self–awareness but not the requisite

psychological equipment to deal with the pain of transient existence. And so throughout

the years, the centuries, the millennia, we have relentlessly constructed makeshift denials

of finiteness. Would we, would any of us, ever be done with our search for a higher

power with whom we can merge and exist forever, for God–given instruction manuals,

for some sign of a larger established design, for ritual and ceremony?

And yet, considering his name on death`s roster, Julius wondered whether a little

ceremony might not be such a bad thing. He jerked away from his own thought as if

scorched—so thoroughly dissonant was it with his lifelong antagonism to ritual. He had

always despised the tools by which religions strip their followers of reason and freedom:

the ceremonial robes, incense, holy books, mesmerizing Gregorian chants, prayer wheels,

prayer rugs, shawls and skullcaps, bishop`s miters and crosiers, holy wafers and wines,