{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

So the condition under which low-browness, gentlemen, and progress in this country has come to the common man is--or what you call democracy; you can call it with various names--is very severe discipline. The discipline is that everybody has to keep going. That is, he has to turn on the radio. He has to listen to Mr. Eisenhower's speech, or at least to Elizabeth Taylor's speech. And -- perhaps you listen to {Debbie}, too. This -- what these gentlemen from the press know so very well is this being kept posted, this getting on, is a very strict discipline. It is very strange that it is never discussed, even not by the psychologists of this country. They all try to have private patients. But the country itself would immediately go insane if at the one -- any one moment, this constant influx of the next idea would be stopped.

I want to bring home to you the fact that you can every day live arbitrarily. But the sequence of these days is not arbitrary. You think you are free to think today this, you -- interest this. That's all right. But the fact of the matter is that in this country with the election campaigns, and with the incredible novelty of the situation--geographically, and politically, and otherwi- -- and socially--the march of events--the cavalcade, as it has been also called -- there are many words, you see, the March of Dimes, you have, always these words of move -- of big movement--that the movie theater of events forces upon the mind a constant flux, a perpetual renewal of his representations of his concepts, of his vision, of hi- -- what's in his mind. Don't believe for a minute that because you say you are independent and free that you are. The pictures that cross your mind, and -- usually cross out your me- -- your -- your reason, blind you. They are the flashlights of the daily news, or the flashlight of the daily impression, or whatever it is -- for. In any case, the American public is treated to sensations.

Now the professional man is so boring, because he may have to look at the same tree for a whole lifetime and count the rings. You know, that's a very boring performance. Now, as we read the papers, we hear that here, a forester does this experiment with the longevity of a tree, and discusses it; then you read about the pyramids, then you read about excavations of the Sinanthropus, of the man -- the -- oldest { } in China, and on it goes. And there is no end to the novelties that press on your brain. That's the typical attitude of the public. The public is in this country more disciplined than in any other, because it is ritual that you go to the movies three times, and you know of the next movie; you decide -- from hearsay whether to go there or not. Now, you are -- have to be in the race. What Makes Sammy Run? was a book which a boy from my college wrote with great success in Hollywood. And he's still here. You know the book, is it -- or is forgotten again? What Makes Sammy -- Makes Sammy Run? Huh?

Who wrote it?

(Budd Schulberg.)

Of course. And I thought it was a horrible book. Very boring. But you know, teachers usually don't think much of their students. But it -- the phrasing I thought was so inhuman. But that's the idea, you see: running, running, running, running, running; and usually chasing your own tail. You cannot in this country recall to a public audience what they thought a year ago. That's an insult.

They tell me that when -- 50 years ago when you came to California and you asked a man who was his grandmother, he would shoot you. That was an insult. Probably it wasn't very pleasant to know who the grandmother was. Now that has disappeared. You don't shoot people for their grandfather. But you do shoot a man if you tell him that he was a McCarthy man in 19- -- 1948, you see. That's no longer { }. He won't shoot you, but he won't talk to you. And he will not hear it. He'll just -- he'll deny it. And there is a strange faculty in the public to forget what it thought. If you read Shakespeare, the mob in -- in Julius Caesar, when they stone Cinna the poet, you know -- remember, they burn him. Obviously next day not one of these people would remember that they ever did such a thing. All these good people who lynch people in the South for the last hundred years of course, have never known anything of it the next day.

The forgetfulness, gentlemen, of a crowd that comes together for one new information, or one new stimulus is a remarkable feature. But it is inherent in the organization of a society in which we keep recognizing each other by the tie of the -- of the day, by the fashion. And a -- way, as the French have created the physical fashion for the ladies, America has created the mental fashion for men. And that, since it is invisible, this deification of the mind and movement, that is unheard-of in the history of the world, and it of course destroys everything we call "the people." Because people are of long memory. They are immune against the immediately stim- -- immediate stimuli; they are quite indifferent to what the world says about the education of their children; and laughs when the child comes home and says, "Mother, we must now have a television set." This country was built up in the -- 18th century, as you know, by non-conformists, by people who were proud when they could say their child, "We don't do this, because all the neighbors do it."

Now I ask you how it is possible with the pressure of the schools on every household today that parents really get through this. They -- they are just blackmailed by -- this. There's extortionist movement on foot by the children against their parents with the simple reasoning: everybody else does it. Now, you shake

your head. -- Lady, you say this isn't true? Wie?

(No. It is true.)

Yes you th- -- well, wonderful. Wonderful. We have one non-conformist in the hall. I congratulate you. You save -- you save the country. This is a very serious business. I know of course, and we shall -- that the people of this country have taken a -- an energetic stand against this. But the official American as seen from the outside for the last hundred years, gentlemen, is that low-brow, the man who is interested in every new idea, and every new invention, and every new discovery until the next. Until the next. It -- the -- you know very well how the newspapers drop a bomb, and next day you can't find it in the paper. You are desperate. You are so interested. Well, they are interested in the next thing. And that has never -- if you -- you read an English paper. That's very much staid. If there is something important happened, you can follow it up. Impossible here. Never mentioned again.

You must know that this is a specific feature, because history makes no sense if it doesn't enable you to understand the specific and particular character of a nation, or of a new world, as this really is. This is much more than one nation. And it is this character that after 1850 was pronounced. It was already enac- -- of course, developing before.

I give you a li- -- a funny story. John Quincy Adams was president of the United States. And there was a lady journalist in Washington going around and trying to improve her very bad finances by getting sensational news. So one day, he was swimming in the Potomac all by himself, with his clothes on the ba- -- river bank, when suddenly he saw that a lady--or what -- shall say "a woman"--was sitting on these clothes. And she said, "If you don't give me an interview, you can't get into your clothes." And since he was absolutely naked as Adam, he had to give -- grant her the interview. And she could improve her financial status, and then he was allowed to go home, the president of the United States.

So the -- the publicity, you see, is already at that time, in the '20s of the 19th century, in full bloom. You couldn't have done this to George Washington. That's the difference. Wouldn't have existed, the means there wouldn't have existed, this kind of -- of -- of code. She -- nobody would have dared to do this. And so there is a very distinct break in the tradition of this country, when all this was -- became natural, and became important.

What I have tried to say at the moment is the word "discipline." The discipline of a democracy is a very severe one. And I sometimes think it is much more

severe than anything we had in Europe ever. What you call "militarism," "feudalism," "royalty," was much more relaxing and much less discipline than you have under the law of publicity. You have -- publicity is absolutely pitiless. Once you get into the clutches of publicity here in this country, you well know that there -- you are ground till there is really not even chaff left, let alone the grain of wheat. And this merciless right of the public to participate for the moment in anything that happens now is the eminent feature, which every other -- nation, I think, will always attribute to this country: the severe discipline of the public person to have his bowels photographed when they are operated upon.

And it is only now -- I come to the consequence. You all pride yourselves that in this country, you are closer to nature. I deny it. I think this country is once in a very artificial situation, which I do not in any way criticize, because I think it's an important and inevitable function among the people of the world, that one nation should bear the brunt of the slogan "for all and everybody." This publicity means that a news, an invention, a fact has to come to everybody. And there is this definite office that in one nation this comes first, and all the other interests of the few, and even of the many, and even of the one, came second seat. It is this -- all right as long as we belong to a mem- -- as a member to a group of nations in which these other offices are allowed to function. That's one condition. And it is wholesome if you are aware that any one of these floodlights of the day are erratic, that not one of them -- is without its danger when you take it for the end.

Take the McCarthy story. It wasn't dangerous in itself that at one time, people shouldn't expurgate this Communist invasion from this country. It only becomes important or dangerous if this is then the new face of the country, you see, the fanaticism, and the annihilation of any opponent to whom you can paste the -- the name of a -- of "Communist" or -- or "fellow traveler." The exaggeration is incredible. I think the McCarthy business is an interesting story, because when the man died he was forgotten. He was already forgotten when he died.

And so you must understand that the discipline in democracy is that out of the 365 heresies under the sun, all the 365 days -- day in court, none can be absent. That's why I think the situation of minority rights in this country is of such first importance. The majority would at any one moment try to overrule, and override, you see, all exceptions. But since we know already by bitter experience that one day later they would repent it, you see, the -- the -- Marshall -- the Constitution has introduced certain inhibitions beyond which Congress cannot go. And that was invented as this country rode along. The fathers of this Constitution--in 1787, the Federalists--hadn't thought of that. As you know, Marshall's intervention was completely new when he passed the decision that the United States Congress could not be sovereign in the sense of an arbitrary monarch, you

see, of a despot. This was a discovery. And therefore it belongs to the social history of the United States, because it has to do with the conviction of the majority of -- of all people at any one moment.

I give you the figures for repeal -- for Prohibition. I told -- showed you that four-fifths of all the legislative bodies of the United States, you see, in their votes--you remember the figures--voted in 1924 Prohibition. And 15 years later, it was not -- not left on the books. The story of this amendment, of the--it's the 18th, isn't it?--the 18th Amendment explain -- may explain to you that I'm speaking here of real, bitter experiences of this country, that as of the moment, you see, the -- any opinion, or any -- any feeling will hold sway over this country. But that you know already that there are 364 other days in the year, and another feeling will come to the fore. And if you would prevent this, we would go all insane, because any one of these feelings, opinions, and convictions exaggerated and carried to its -- to its bitter end, you see, would destroy this republic. This is, I think, is a -- is an important insight. The kaleidoscope of democracy lives by its completeness. Once you stop this wheel turning, you see, the country will find itself--well, I won't use too -- too strong a word--but it certainly is a medical case. And unfortunately as yet we have no psychoanalysts for the nations.

I myself have written -- written an -- a serious work -- book; it's a lifetime work, a psychoanalyst--- -analysis of the different nations of the world, called Out of Revolutions: Autobiography of the Western World. I think we will have to consider very seriously whether our -- the nations are not really the centers of our complexities. I don't think that psychoanalysis is doing a good job, because it deals with the individual. But what is in our minds is not of our own making. That has much larger, you see, complex, institutional origins and destinies. I think the nations need much more to be analyzed than those individuals. And I'm very serious in this. I think the harm done and the money spent on psychoanalysis in private matters is just an absurdity of the bourgeois age of the 19th century, which has come to this country belatedly. Because all these mental fashions of Europe come here belatedly. When it was already unnecessary in Europe, it has come to this country. It is the last stand taken by the bourgeois class in its disintegration, but it has -- is a much more serious proposition that nations can be mentally -- get mentally stuck and have repressions.

And I think in this country the repression for which an historian is meant to act as an antidote, your repression, is that you use the word "nature" and "natural" where it doesn't belong for your own character.

The American character is a highly complicated character, an historical character, with a definite function in the Christian tradition. And you deny, so to speak, your powers and your way of outgrowing or enlarging on your position if

you think that what you call the "American" is the natural man. He is the man who has come from Europe and found that the one, and the few, and the manyness of the Constitution -- of that -- continent could be supplemented by an order in which we first think of everybody, before we think of one. And that's -- all elect the president is just the -- the symbol, so to speak, of indifference to the one -- the order of the one.

If I had more time, I would show you that the fear of anarchy in other countries has been such that people thought they couldn't -- even find even one ruler. And therefore, kingship was considered a -- you see, the -- the best, because it was a miracle that anyone could rule a crowd. If you wait another 10 years in this country, you will have come to the same dead end, that it will be impossible to find a proper candidate for the presidency, because our states have lost their -- their independence, the individual states. It isn't very much to be governor of a state at this moment. So that's not a good step for the presidency. The wars -- there will be no war probably in the next 20 years, so Mr. Eisenhower will not -- or Mr. Grant, or George Washington, or General Taylor, or General Tyler -- they can have no way of proving themselves -- or Jackson. And so where shall they come from? From the Rand Corporation?

Well, this is very serious. We have at this moment no competitive system, you see, for the candidacy of -- for political office of any scope. I mean, Mr. {Paulson} may be very nice, and I love him for driving a Rambler, but that isn't the -- good enough for preparing anybody for president -- presidency. And this is serious. And you must perhaps -- allow me to state these things, because for the last 10 years, for the last 15 years, America has seen the limitations of its stand for all. The fall, the great -- profound fall of this country was of course when the bomb was nationalized. All inventions belong to mankind.

When Mr. Otto Hahn in Berlin in 1938 discovered the fission of uranium, he published it in a scientific journal, and -- without any seclusion. And as you know, the Germans never built the bomb. But in this country, the military has tried to -- to taint the record of America, which has always been liberal and generous with its inventions, for all foreign people, and has withheld the bomb. That's impossible. It's already I think today understood, after the change in the administration of the Atomic Energy -- Commission, that this was a great mistake: that England, and France, and everybody should have known right away what -- what all -- all about. And this is very ghastly. It's a fall. That's how the fall of Adam and Eve always looks in our own days. You no- -- don't notice it. The character of the fall is always that people are convinced that this is within their rights. But it was a sin against the Holy Spirit of this country.

And therefore, I -- I'm -- dare say that the limitations of the democratic

process have been found. It is not possible. I don't know if I wouldn't have acted like Mr. Strauss in 1946. But it is then -- that would only mean that it is not possible to function in the way that we have declared to be the American way always, you see. There is a leeway, so to speak, and at times you are driven to a different kind of principle, and it should be admitted, because -- although I fear we are not free, we have to follow the bent of our inertia and our nature.

And all I have to say at this moment is that -- these -- my history of society in this country has an immediate bearing on your own amount of freedom. If you do not catch yourself to grow out of the shells of the -- fetters of the 19th century, I think this country must have a third world war, must go smaller than it is into a mere nation--when it is a whole world, and should become even a larger world--and so your -- every one of you, in his turning against this truth, which I try to propose, or upholding and spreading it is deciding whether this country shall be kept small, and narrow, and bigot, or whether it still has a function in the world at large in the future.

Because the -- I can assure you, this system of France, England, Germany, and America is of the past. That's all over. We have now Russia. And we have the East. And we have to function in a different setting. And therefore the boast of being an American is just as childish as the boast of the French, "I am French"; or the Germans, "I'm German"; or the English, "I'm English." It doesn't work any more. That's all over. And the who -- sooner we realize in -- over -- the more we can keep the precious -- elements of the this, our former office.

But you must see that it is a limited function, and is only true under a certain constellation. And the constellation is of course that the ideas are -- do come from -- from -- Fontainebleau, Versailles, and Paris, { }-sur-Seine; they're all French -- your American writers wrote there their poems and painted their paintings in the last hundred years. Vincent Stephen B‚net wrote his John Brown's Body in { }-sur-Seine. And every other French -- American writer, as you know, got his inspiration somewhere else, because to be one in this country was impossible. Herman Melville has expressed it very beautifully in a letter to an English publisher in 1850, and that's therefore the year of decision. He said--let me try to find it--a very beautiful sentence. And I think he -- you will understand that it's no reason to be -- he writes to his -- London -- English publisher, and tries to persuade him to print a book of his in England. "This country"--America--"is at present engaged in furnishing material for future authors, not in encouraging its living ones." I think that's a masterful sentence, a very proud American sentence. In -- 1851 it's written. "This country is at present engaged in furnishing material for future authors, not in encouraging its living ones."

I think this sentence deserves your attention. Perhaps you take it down. It's written on July 20th, 1851. And so the -- author of Moby-Dick and Pierre has to write to his English publisher, you see, feeling that he cannot expect in America the support of the one, of the single person, or the singular { }. You understand? If "this country is at present engaged in furnishing material for future authors, not in encouraging its living ones," all this -- you still can realize at this moment, but it was of course infinitely truer a hundred years ago.

I'll -- left you this -- this about the discipline of democracy. The second thing I left with you, I tried to leave with you--I'm sure I didn't succeed--is that Emerson is the -- the seed of the liberal arts college in this country, and that his glorious time of a -- his forming when he ceased to be a minister--from 1830 that is, to 1850 -- -56, these 30 years have made him the outstanding person as the ancestor of all of us here. I wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be here without Ralph Waldo Emerson, because he has changed the schools of this country, who were barren imitations of the English schools into what we call today a liberal arts college, which doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.

Now it is again against your grain to be told that a man is the seed of an institution, that he embodies it in advance. I have to fight here your connotation of a man as one among many. Mr. Emerson is not a man among many, because he is the forerunner, the beginner, the embodiment in advance of what we are in the mass. Our 99 departments in this college all have a point of contact within Emerson. This diffusion, this -- you can say, anarchy of departments on this campus is already a last--and I think ultimate, and rather threatening--anarchy of an order in which Emerson saw the connections of literature, science, mathematics, poetry, the arts, et cetera. The liberal arts college in him is still harmony. Whether it is this today you all may be -- experience in your own studies.

It's a long story to go into this. But the important kernel of the idea is, gentlemen, that you must not think of fruitful men, of creative men, as people who just then appear in the Dictionary of American Biography per se. It's quite the contrary. What they really are appears in their -- in the many people who live according to the paths beaten by them. The religious revival in this country was started by a man of whom nobody even knows the name today. His name was Tennent. He came to this country in 1716 from North Ireland, a Scotch Presbyterian. And he founded for his six sons and their eight friends the Log -- a log cabin in Pennsylvania. And from this Log Cabin, 14 powerful boys came forth and started the great revival in America. And the man who started the Log Cabin College, as it was called then, Mr. Tennent, has no place in the Dictionary of American Biography, but he of course was the founder. And that's why he has no place in a -- in a world in which only the arrivists, the -- the latest comer, the -- the people who sell something to everybody, you see, are known. If he had --

established, like Bill Graham, a -- a religious department store, everybody would know him.

So it has in this country, of course -- all the important things have also been started from small seeds. But what I ask you to do is to forget even the buildings, to forget that there are walls. Emerson is in you through his spirit. He is in your loins. He is in your body. You -- he has begotten us. This is to be learned in -- from history: how people are begotten. Gentlemen, religion makes faiths. The spirit creates races. Not the body. You can investigate the hormones for what you -- want. The -- the -- the human face is the product of what it thinks and speaks, and what -- how it prays and at whom it looks. If you look at idols, you will look correspondingly like an idolater. And if you look at the living God, you will have a human face. And faiths make races. Perhaps you take this down. And Emerson has created the race of the American college -- student. And that is a race. Quite {a one}.

Race -- faiths make races, and we face up to our L- -- teacher, and we face up to the classics, and we face up to art, or we face up to science, and accordingly we see a different world through his eye -- through our eyes. And once the eye -- eyes begin to live and the ears begin to -- to understand, we are different people.

If you want to see the contrast between this embodiment, I put Emerson into this box of the infinitude of the private citizen. I -- I -- that's the way in which he anticipated your and my privilege, you see, to have a civilized private life of our own during our years of education. Have our library, go to the plays we want, you see, buy the books we -- we like. This whole realm of privacy which he has created -- that of course compares--if you take this here as our clue--compares to the wild horde of immigrants and pioneers who are on the outside--in 1850 everywhere visible--of whom we have to stay -- speak more. Immigrants, who know nothing of being a public, who try to remain a people, and pioneers who try to create a people, know nothing of public.

But here Emerson, in his suave manner -- persuading us that during our formative years, we should be public. We should listen to everything, because the liberal arts college is, of course, the idealized public. It is the discipline of the public to read the book on the book market that comes out, you see, to be interested in new ideas, to go along with the new play, to go under this discipline of the understanding public who buys a ticket, because there is a new artist coming and offering his services.

If you want to understand, however, what has kept this country going and today throws it beyond the limitations of this American of 1850, I give you the name of Herman Melville. Herman Melville is on the surface of things a

contemporary of Walt Whitman and even of -- Emerson. He lived from 1819 to 19- -- to 1891. Perhaps you compare the dates. Emerson as I -- was born 1805, isn't it? I gave you this figure. Wie? And died in 1882. No, it must be -- who has it down? These dates are all -- all very important. I advise you when you -- deal with history, always get your dates first straight. They are the skeleton of history. Never neglect them. They are too much despised in this country. But the biographical dates are terribly helpful, because they show you how very few people stay alive all their life long. Emerson was, for all practical purposes, dead in 1856.

Now Melville, as you know, is the great tragic figure of American literature. Just as Walt Whitman is the big humbug of American literature. And they are contemporaries even in a more severer sense. Walt Whitman is born in 1819, and he died in 19- -- 1892. So this -- they really overlap completely. Now, you may know that from 1851 to 18- -- to 1927, you could not buy Melville's Pierre. For all practical purpose he didn't exist. It was the first edition after the first edition, which was a failure, didn't sell, in 1927. Yet Herman Melville is the American who -- from the very first belongs to more than the 19th century. He belongs as well to the 21st century as to the 17th. And that's why I think he is the most important American. He is not the greatest American. I don't say this. But he's the most important American, because you can see here that you are all wrong when you think that a human being must be a contemporary of his contemporaries.

The greatness of a man is measured by the amount of distemporaneity which he can bear. To be a contemporary is very, very little. Anybody who is a real human being is as much connected with some time before him, and some time after him. In which way, I mean, through children or parents, that's one thing; through books, or through laws, or through memories, or through services, that's another. A soldier who today serves in the United States Army certainly is connected with 1776. He can't help it. He does support the creation that -- got -- started there. So to be a soldier means to reach out for more than -- one's own generation. And if you die on the battlefield, all the more so, because the meaning of your death then is only contained in the next generation to follow. We talked about this in the beginning.

Now Herman Melville is the soldier of the spirit, who has embodied, who has lived, and has lived deliberately this lack of interest in the contemporary scene. Since you think that authors have to be measured by the sale of their books--at least that's what they officially tell us all the time, and that if a book is a failure, he can't be a great genius--I -- I must warn you: Melville is the glowing protest against this nonsense. The fewer people read a book, in the beginning the more probable it is that it is a very important book.

When I read the criticism of Melville in your English department textbooks and so on, I'm always appalled by the -- insidious and insipid attempt to place this man in the year 1851 or in 1870. There is a book--I'm afraid to say by a very good man in this country, that's why I won't give his name--which tries to make Mr. Melville an appendix of the literary movement of the '50s in New York City. That's appalling, you see. That's an attempt -- to make genius a member of the low-brows. To -- { } him as all.

For the all and the discipline of everybody, the day and the contemporaneity of the idea do exist. It is obvious that as far as I am not a scientist myself, I have to take notice of the new discovery of the two and-a-half minutes which it takes to send radar to the -- Venus from your papers. And I'm only participating with this little bit of information in the progress of science, am I not? And therefore, I have to turn to the next. When somebody else invents something, I again want to say -- know something about plant life, I want to know -- want to know something about stones, I want to know something of the navy, and so I keep going.

So with regard to my 23 hours-a-day stupidity or interest in general affairs, I am obviously dependent on my being a contemporary. For Mr. Everybody is the man of the day, and every one of us is Mr. Everybody. -- There is nobody who can exclude him -- from this.

But with regard to the specific contribution which somebody makes who devotes himself to Laura Bridgman or Helen Keller for a lifetime to make these people see and hear, the day has absolutely nothing to offer. They are not contemporaries of anything. And the deg- -- every one of us--and specially the women, gentlemen--in this country have to rescue this -- these other offices of the spirit. Any woman is selective and says, "This one and nobody else." If she says, "Everybody else," you know what she is.

Selection, which means all the higher -- all the higher stages of the spiritual life--selectivity--goes by degrees, it is true. But Herman Melville was absolutely uncompromising. And I may perhaps give you one sentence, a fam- -- from the fam- -- famous sermon from Moby-Dick. There is a great sermon, you -- you may recall. Who has not read Moby-Dick, by the way? Well, you're honest. Would you do it? Please do. I may ask a question in the examination on it. I will. I take it for granted that nobody can go to college who hasn't read Moby-Dick, and still knows what { }. That's of course more than they usually do.

Father Mapple gives a sermon on Jonah, and he says--and that is very much what Melville said in his letters to Hawthorne, himself: "Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall." Now that's hard doctrine. And perhaps

you take this sentence down, because there you have the constant paradox of any -- in any democracy which lives by public. Public is the people who don't have to listen, who are not a captive audience, who can go home, and don't buy -- not buy the ticket.

Now if you start everything, every truth, every movement from pleasing the public, you can't go right. You must go wrong. Yet our whole society is organized on this principle. And somebody in this audience has said to me, "Oh, in education, we had a buyer's market." This was told -- said to me four weeks ago. I can assure you that in all my life--I began teaching when I was 13 years old--I have never thought of the teaching and learning proposition in terms that even -- you would have made me understand the term "buyer's market" and "seller's market" in education, because education means to tell somebody something what he doesn't know. So there can be no buyer's market, because the -- the child is ignorant. And to please him, and to try to -- to persuade him that he has made the choice is one of the silliest things in this country which I per- -- meet with now, that people of 5, or 7, or 12, or 13 are allowed to say whether they want -- would like to take mathematics, or English, or what-not. This -- insanity. Absolute insanity. That's why there will never be any education in this country as long as they have these -- superintendents of schools, who think that is -- that they -- they are just selling their product. Throw them all out.

Education is not the process of selling anything. What is teaching? Why do I teach you this? You see, I have to teach you all the things which I have not been able to carry out in my life. To teach is for every living generation the remainder of the things undone, yet. Therefore all teaching is prophetic. All teaching is a -- a -- is a wit- -- testimonial to the fact that I implore you to do what I have not been able to do. That's teaching. Nothing else. You know some things have to be done forever, or they have to be done in the future. So you teach them. Because you can't do it all, what has to be done. Teaching is intimately connected with deeds, because it is -- makes sure that the deeds are followed up which already have been done. That's what teaching is.

And you speak of "skills," and all these infinite, infamous, ignominious sales ta- -- sales problems. The degradation of education in this country is complete because the people who ded- -- dedicate themselves to the profession of -- education don't know what it is.

Now this has to do with Herman Melville. The man is for- -- was forgotten, because he didn't sell, you see. It was a buyer's market. Now obviously Herman Melville did not cater to the public. And he says in so many words already in his earliest youth, that he wouldn't, that he prefers to be a failure than to cater to the public. And therefore, this very cruel sentence--and I know it is

cruel--and I want you to take down literally: "Woe to him who seeks to please, rather than to appall." A child has to be frightened out of his wits what happens if it doesn't learn. But that goes for everything. "Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness." Whose name is more to him than goodness.

Now I have tried to show you that the world is held together only by the people who are not totally sunk in their own time. That's why the life of Jesus cannot be written, you see, because the whole principle of the existence of Jesus in His own lifetime was that He did not count into His own time, that He only came to the beginning of His workmanship as a {vis- -- a legacy} after His death. That's called the Resurrection. They express it in different terms, but you can express it in terms of contemporaneity and distemporaneity. Jesus is a complete distemporary because not even one of His apostles understood Him at the time of His life. Peter betrayed Him.

So distemporaneity, gentlemen, is the heritage of the Christian era, that a man is as -- more important for the continuity of history, the more he is able to be indifferent to the -- agreeableness of his contemporaries.

And therefore, you should have the courage to say that Herman Melville broke out of the march of events and therefore is today the most important American of the 19th century. For this very reason, that you can -- why? He comes from Shakespeare and the Bible. He read this. And he read it in the most fortunate, privileged position of reading it when he was 25. That is, after the -- the Dulcineas of the Sunday school had done their work. So it wasn't sweet. It was very harsh, really. Like -- as his sermon on Jonah shows, you see. He read the Bible when it should be read. If I could pass a law, I would pass a law that nobody is allowed to read the Bible before he's 40. It's the only way in which it can recover, so to speak, as its abuse as -- as -- as Pepsi-Cola.

Because the Bible is written to give us the power not to be contemporaries. That's all it's written for. That's the whole meaning of the Bible. Don't be contemporary; be prophetic. That's why there are the prophets.

Backward and forward, we have to keep the contact with all times, or we are not saving man from a deep -- a profound fall. Melville of course proved this, because he was the only man not surprised by the Civil War, in his heart. Mankind did not change because the Civil War broke out. People didn't, so to speak, look suddenly different, you see, from being angels now being devils. Walt Whitman, the prophet of optimism, was completely addl- -- fainted when the war broke out. Didn't know for two years what it was all about. The same with Emerson. They all had to make a complete readjustment, because their

na‹ve, optimistic faith of 1850 of course went to pieces. The only man who hadn't -- had nothing to take back, and nothing to add to his insight into the secrets of this country is Herman Melville. You find in Mardi, which is written in 1849, already a clear delineation of the limitations of democracy in this country: why it is good, and how far it can go, and how far it cannot go. The book Mardi is probably un- -- unknown to you. Who has read Mardi? That's all? Oh, poor Melville.

He -- only to show you that there is a very clear path. Here we have the Christian people, and the Bible and Shakespeare bear witness to this -- to this victory over the moment, which any people constitute, the indifference to the fashions of the day. Then you get the public in 1850, all the fashionable things of the mind. Let them in, and get under their discipline.

Today, as you know, we have not only the fission of the atom, but we have, for the last hundred years--as a revolt against the private citizen and the individual--the disintegration of the individual. The real problem of psychoanalysis, of labor, of juvenile delinquency, of the mass, you see, mass spirit, or the mass media is that we are less than individuals. We are disintegrated. We have nervous breakdown. We are split personalities. This country as you know has the highest rate of schizophrenics on -- all over the world. Why is that so? Because it is impossible to be an individual. Nobody can stand the strain. You either integrate into a people, or you fall down and split into many fragments.

Now this fragmentation is the content of Melville's second great book, of Pierre. Moby-Dick is Shakespeare and the Bible renewed for America. And Pierre is the anticipation of Freud and all the problems of our day, a hundred years ahead of time, the ambiguities. That we all are at least two people is the content of Pierre. That we are not individuals, and nobody can be. That's why it is called "The Ambiguity." That's why you all should read it. It's a very difficult book. And the author went to pieces over it. And the -- Encyclopaedia Britannica has a very interesting statement on this man, Melville. He says -- she says -- they say there in this article on Melville that the books he wrote, beginning with Pierre, "seem to be written by another author." Now that -- that's strong language.

Now our literary men, my dear ladies and gentlemen, are sacrifices. And Melville is the sacrifice, a victim of America. And he was sacrificed so that one person...

[tape interruption; end]