ABSTRACT
Asked what he meant by Beyond, Richards responded, "Beyond anything you can think of." The witticism contained a challenge for both writer and reader. Beyond self-consciously addresses posterity; it has the meditative power, the sense of the extreme, and the range of Last Things. Certainly Richards thought of it in these terms. He called Beyond "my final thing, in any large way." 1 Large way means confronting the ultimate questions of good and evil through the timeless works of Homer, the author of Job, Plato, and Dante. The pressure to make such a statement delayed him for years in "an aweful [sic] amount of re-reading and re-thinking."2 The pages, when they finally came, demanded much. "Yes," he conceded on another occasion, "it is difficult."3
