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

Harold Stahmer: (I think it's only appropriate to admit that after this last lecture that faculty members need inspiration as well as students. And although I had you in mind, I also had myself in mind in asking Professor Huessy to come and lecture here. It's a very difficult task to keep a man like Professor Huessy under wraps, so that -- that he has all his strength for the lectures and the other tasks that he has. Just now, Professor {Stadenau} came by and in the last two minutes, he had to execute a text from Paul's Letter to the Corinthians.

(So he's a very dangerous man. Whether he meets a farmer, or a professor of German, or a biblical scholar, he always responds fully, and consequently occasionally wears himself out.

(Now I hope that we have kept him under wraps a bit over the weekend. In any event, this is his last lecture. And beforehand, may I extend to you our -- our appreciation and our thankfulness for your taking time out to come here? Especially after just having a week in Germany. Thank you.)

I asked you last time to read up Emerson's poem, "Give All to Love." And I didn't know at that time that the Herald-Tribune would come to my rescue. The paper here has a headline today: "Can Dreams Be Prophetic?" I've asked you to read the poem by Emerson, "Give All to Love," because it should prove to you that all important speech has to do with the long-range past and the long-distant future, that to be prophetic is much more natural than to say, "The" -- "La rose est une fleur." We don't talk for such nonsense, as in the grammar books you are taught to consider as language. Because "La rose est une fleur," I don't have to say. If there is a a rose, and if you are here, I give you the rose and that's all there is to it.

That is, present things would never have led to the creation of speech. Present things can be shown. Present things can be demonstrated by our five senses. All speech tries to bridge distances far away. And as to the prophetic dreams, or as to the poem by Emerson -- while Emerson was writing this strange poem in which he recommends to a young lover not to be jealous if his girl has somebody better and somebody bigger than he -- this happened over in Europe in a very significant case.

You have heard of Richard Wagner, I am sure, and of his father-in-law, Franz Liszt, the other musician, who sponsored Wagner's whole career by his devotional affection. The family Liszt has rescued Wagner from ruin. The daughter of Franz von Liszt was married to a great conductor, Blow, Hans von Blow,

a very fine man. And they had several children. But one day, she realized that her father's protective attitude towards Wagner was not enough, that Wagner's ship was on the rocks, unless something drastic was done. She left her husband while she was pregnant and went over to Wagner. And Bayreuth was built. And you couldn't -- hardly think of Europe and America over the last hundred years without thinking of the art of Richard Wagner uniting the educated people every summer in Bayreuth.

This very extraordinary feat that a loving wife and a very intelligent, beau- -- dutiful person did something so out of the ordinary was written up by a pale, anemic American in Concord, New Ham- -- Massachusetts, called Ralph Waldo Emerson, 20 years ahead of time. It's a -- a poem for which we have no cause to show in the life of Emerson. He was happily married, and I think he was over-satisfied that he managed to have one wife. He couldn't have had more. And so plurality of -- affection certainly was not in this man's nature. And yet he was driven in his discovery of the limitations -- or the non-limitations of his -- the human race to say that love was anarchic, and that nobody could claim just by the sacrament of marriage as conducted in church to be safe against the onslaughts of this god. "When half-gods go, the gods arrive." That's the very strange end of this poem for which we have no explanation in the life of Emerson, or in his environment, or in his experience among his friends.

And yet if it hadn't been written, if this promise had not come to the human race, I think the bliss that came to Cosima and Richard Wagner in their adventure would have been lacking. Because all important events have to be promised. And here you have the unique feature that a poem written in America, in a corner, makes sense in the wide world far -- thousands of miles away.

Emerson is a very strange figure, because he's much more than an American. He is the living faith of his age. I can prove this to you by the fact that after he had written his essays, the first great thinker of Europe after him simply inherited his form of writing books. Friedrich Nietzsche broke away from the old European tradition of writing systematic books--treatises, you see, with many, many chapters--and instead took to the method first shown to him by Emerson. So even formally, Emerson's way of speaking has been productive of progeny; it has been prophetic.

Because there is, of course, prophecy also in the way you live. If you live for the first time a life, you see, and it's a good life and an important life, others will take it up and will follow suit.

Speech then is quite normally prophetic if it is important. Your prattle--the way we talk together about the weather--that is all only second-rate speech.

That's unnecessary. It's very nice. But it is an exercise for the important moments in life. You talk all the time to the boy so that one day when he proposes, you know whether he is serious or not. This one word is -- that's spoken between you is the real word. And all the other words are purely preparatory.

You will never understand then living speech if you count the number of expressions, the number of words, you see; because one important word explains everything about speech to you. And all the other unimportant don't.

So -- I have -- we once figured out that the New York Times in the Sunday edition, October, contained four times as many words as the Bible--one edition. Well, that doesn't mean that the -- edition of the New York Times was four times as important as the Bible. It shows that it was not even one-quarter as important.

Well, you have to -- to learn this, because now I come to my second point. Genuine speech is always either declaring love or declaring war. There is no other important speech. This is very hard for you to take, but -- the question that is important in -- in humanity is life and death. War means--the declaration, the pronunciation--that something must be killed and died, an old order that is obsolete. And love, of course, has to be explained in order to make room for a new alliance, for a new unity.

Emerson, in writing this poem, declared for the unity of western man. And ever since, this has remained. The Russians are still quite uncertain whether they go our way or not, because they are making inroads into the sacrament of marriage. They prevent a woman to leave -- their country, you see, to follow their -- the husband. That's unheard-of in our tradition of the West, you see. If the Russians should persist in this perversion, they would leave our community for good. If they come around and say, "Marriage comes first, and the government comes second," then we can remain friends or make friendship again. Otherwise it's impossible.

Because love and war are the powers that set in motion in every human heart the power to found new peoples, new nations, new alliances, or to break up obsolete alliances and obsolete relations. And on -- of this, marriage-making and marriage-breaking, the world consists. All the rest is bunk.

All secular activities -- gentlemen, therefore, are second-rate. Government is only government as long as it has the power to declare war. A government like Luxembourg, or now western Germany, that has lost this power, no longer is a government. You see, it's a second-rate government. It's a dependence. And -- government only become serious when it dares to go to war, either against crime within your city, against mugging, or if it goes to war against foreign enemies.

It's the token. It is the -- the symptom of an existing government that it can break down, you see, deadly weapons, deadly onslaughts, deadly attacks, on the safety of the citizens. And it has to declare war on crime, on injustice, because they make for death.

I want to -- only to show you that the power to pronounce the death warrant, the verdict that this man has to be locked up or executed, is the -- as much within the realm of speech-making as the declaration of love that "you are my only one with whom I shall stick it out, and even leave my own country in order to stay with you." You just have to read Ruth, the Book of Ruth in the Bible, to know that the Bible has reduced this question of living speech to this very entity. There is one book in the Bible which -- forbids you Jews to marry people from Moab, Moabites. And the next book in the Bible, the very next book says that Ruth was as -- a Moabite and was married by Boaz, just the same. So the breaking of the law, you see, by love, is the content of this Bible story.

If I have enlarged at this moment the content of any speech--that it knows no state boundaries, that it knows no linguistic barriers, that Mr. Emerson writing in English wrote just the same the language of mankind--just as music would be an international language, you see--you perhaps wake up to the greatness of our topic, speech.

My second point today then is to show you that there is a deeper grammar than you have learned in school which embraces this fact that speech is universal, that speech is that force that unites all languages, so called. It doesn't matter that there are -- 9,178 different languages. Behind all these languages there is one language--the logos: the power to invoke the future, to promise. And the whole Bible, as you know, is written around the problem of a Promised Land that finally is fulfilled, and around the coming of the Messiah that in the Christian era finally is completed and done.

Promise and fulfillment is the reason why we have to speak, because and I must live in a context that is longer than our petty own life. And if there wasn't the fact that you have a name that will be carried on by your grandchildren, you see, you wouldn't have to -- we wouldn't have to speak. But -- the only power by which you can reach posterity, by which it makes sense to teach you today in 1962, because you have to say something in -- 2010 to your own grandchildren--and something that is true; and I try to give you some such content today--it's the only reason that Barnard College has a raison d'ˆtre, you see. College education makes only sense--a liberal arts education--against the chemistry department and against the -- the highway department, because we have to reach out beyond our own lifetime. You have to tell your grandchildren about your grandparents; and you have to tell -- and the grandparents must participate

in some way or other by curse or blessing in the future of this family. And what you -- we say about the family is true about the nation. You have to tell the people about Lincoln, you see, although he was murdered in 1865.

There is no reason that the physical event of a man's death should finish his influence. And I'll give you a very simple solution, you see, of this. When we speak of people in Heaven, of the saints and -- of the Resurrection at Easter, we mean that there are people who have died long ago and are still ahead of us. If Jesus has any power in your lives, it means that He is still more of the future than you are. We are obsolete, as long as we only listen to the -- to the demands of our belly. If we -- however, can listen to a good name, to a sacred name, then Heaven is this which is still to come. Heaven is the spoken, promised future. And that is the only -- allowable use of the word "Heaven." Our Father in Heaven means the God who is still to come. It doesn't mean, of course, a god who is a better Sputnik.

This all is -- seems to be -- have become forgotten today. People really cling again to the idea that Heaven is sky. Obviously that isn't true. Now all the saints and all the great souls which you need for your own upbringing and your own achievement are ahead of us. A good man, when he dies, is not dead. But most of the people who are at the funeral usually are already dead long ago. As I look around, I find that most people are dead by 35. They only seem to live. They are disappointed. They have written off their own -- task in life, and they hang on for dear life or for the savings book of their parents.

The future, then, and the -- past, which both is not -- accessible to our five senses, are the topic of speech.

Now if you -- think of -- for one moment back to the Spinoza grammar--which is not grammar but geometry--you will find there that we distinguish today between higher mathematics and simple arithmetic. "Two and 2 is 4" is not higher mathematics. But if you think of all the figures between zero and 1, you enter the realm of higher mathematics, because you think of the whole of numbers at once, simultaneously. With "2 and 2 and -- 4," you come discursively to one figure after the other: 2 and 2 is 4. That's not higher mathematics. Higher mathematics begins to un- -- be unraveled if you speak of all the possible values, you see, numerical values between 1 and zero, for example, or between 1 and infinity. Then you enter this realm which for the last 400 years has been labeled "higher mathematics."

I want to introduce you today to the deeper grammar of the human soul, which only exists when a sentence--"Today I feel good"--is seen in context of all the possible variation of the sentences: "I did not feel well yesterday. I shall, I

hope, be better tomorrow." We speak this day of the -- the sentence of the present: "I don't feel well today," because we want to compare it to the past and the future of the same sentence. If you say that America at this moment is in trouble, you can only say this meaningfully because there has been a time where America has been simply great and not in trouble, and you hope probably that there will be a time where it is not in trouble again--at least Mr. {Welch} thinks so. That is, you must forget your grammar book which says that you must understand every one sentence by itself.

"This water is the best water in the world," your waiter tells you when he brings you {the} chlorine water.

Well, first of all, this isn't true. And second, it is a sentence which is unnecessary. If he would sip it first, you see, you would believe that it isn't poisoned. And you -- as you know, in the old days, drinks were not taken except by the cup-bearer, you see, tasting it first. No language necessary. But language that compares states of life, experiences over the centuries, they have to be articulated.

And the whole secret of speech then is in the fact that you can say, "America --" Europe, for example, "Europe was a great civilization." Or you can say, "Europe is a civilization of rank today." Or you can say, "Europe may be again a great continent; at this moment li- -- is lying low."

That is, we pass judgment whether something belongs into the past, or the future, or the present. If I say, "Psychoanalysis is a great fashion in -- America," or if I say, "It has been a great fad in this country," each time I add life, I add future, I add prospects to psychoanalysis; or I reduce psychoanalysis, you see, to something of the past.

In every moment that you say a sentence about your parents--you say, "Oh, these old people"--you dismiss them. They have no authority, you see. But if you say, "Oh, but my father has said..." that's different. Then you still listen to him.

And you will find this very strange distinction between the imperfect: "My father was at one time," you see, "a leading person in the city, so that even his children listened to him," and if you say, "He has been an important man," then he still is. The perfect has a different quality from the imperfect, you see.

We dismiss something which we relegate to the past. And I wonder how many people in New York would today decide to say, "America -- Europe was a great civilization," and how many would take, you see, in a vote -- make an -- a

negative statement and say, "It no longer is." In this we decide on which side we put life and on which side we put death.

Any one sentence is a death warrant or a certificate of birth to any one thing which we label with a tense, with a grammatical tense. Can you see this? You can't escape this. You pass judgment on what you figure to be on the -- side of your life and what you put on the side of the dead, the cemetery, the past, the burial, the funeral.

We have to pronounce judgment over dead and living, whenever we open our mouth. And that's why it's natural, you will now understand, that prophetic speech like Emerson's poem should be the most important speech. Because that deals with the uncreated future, and the future would not come about without one first starting the great Halleluia, the great song, "Tomorrow there will be a better time."

Without speech, there would be no future; whereas the past can creep up on us whether we have the courage to say, "But that's dead," you see, or whether we say that it has to be continued, it's still good enough; we -- we carry it over into the future.

Today it's all topsy-turvy, you see. People think that 2 and 2 is 4; for the man from Missouri, it's the one certain thing. I assure you that figures are the most uncertain thing, especially when you play on the stock exchange. Figures are melting away because they only belong to the past. Names are prophetic, and if there has been no Israelite when Moses -- hears God in the bushes--there are no Israelites at that mom- -- as of that moment, to speak of, you see--obviously the -- the promise can call them into being;

I have always considered it the greatest feature of the Old Testament that in the 11th chapter of Genesis there is a table of nations in which the Jews do not exist or do not appear. The Jews -- are the only nation in the history of the world that have had the courage to admit that at one time they didn't exist. You know that the Mormons can't bear the idea that there hasn't been an American revelation. So they invented this Book of Mormons in order to prove that there had been Americans, you see, with the right -- on -- with the right faith long before.

It's a natural for all children of the Devil to believe that they have to prove that God is -- has not been there at one time, but they have. People call it today mythical thinking; you can call it as you like. Professors also are inclined to think that they have been there before Jesus has lived, and they know all -- what it was all about. The naivet‚ of most people is that they cannot think actually of their own not having existed once.

If you think of the Nazis--here are these sons of industrialism in the big cities of Germany, in the Ruhr or in Berlin, you see, coming from the country, being Slavs, Poles, Wends, { }, what have you, but certainly not being Germanic tribes at all, but inventing this eternal past, you see, that 2,000 years before, they have been the sons of Wotan and Thor.

The -- the table of nations in Genesis reflects this desire of the natural man not to have pronounced -- to pronounce a death warrant over his ancestors, over his past. You also think now that New York has a character that has always existed. Of course that isn't true. There was just a time -- in America it's hard to -- suppress this fact, that there was a time when there were no Americans, and there was even no New York; it was called New Amsterdam.

The Jews are the only nation in the history of the world that have--and that is their whole merit, I may say; you can -- this is all we have to learn from the Old Testament, constantly; the power to admit that at one time they have not been there; that God is free to create new nations, new peoples. And it's, of course, very important for you and me to understand that God now can create a future that is not tied up with America. Forty years ago, everybody in America said, "The future is that what takes place in America." But today, we aren't so sure, you see. The future may now take place elsewhere. And we may have to come around to it.

So the future is the most frail, and the most endangered, and the most imperiled thing because it depends on the names you and I pronounce with such devotion that something that does not yet exist comes into being. Names are creative. If they aren't, they are name-calling. The na- -- language is very eloquent by distinguishing between naming, you see, and name-calling. If you -- if you give a -- name-calling means to condemn the person to belong to a dead part of life, you see. That's name-calling. You see, you subsume him: "Damned," and then you go on with all the epithets you can find in New York so frequently when the other person doesn't listen in.

Name-calling al- -- usually takes place, in the most cases, in the absence of the person who is meant. And if you hear- -- listens in, he is insulted. That is, he is reduced to ashes; he is reduced to humil- -- humiliation. He is not allowed to participate in your own life. That's what name-calling is, you see, using a dead or deader name for somebody who, the moment before, thought you treated him fraternally as his brother -- as your brother, as your sister. It's very wise that the -- language should have preserved this word, "name-calling," for something so essential as the excision, the exclusion of a person from society, from my own society. With name-calling I declare that I don't care how this man feels about me. Isn't that true, you see? He is outside my estimate, my esteem, too, because

let him think what he feels. I call him a "Damned Such-and-Such." In this very moment, I break peace, I break the relation, I break the unity of the names that circulate.

And so the naming community--this may surprise you--from the very first beginning of the creation of mankind has been based on the international language of names. Jesus and Caesar are names for all people. It is not true that you think that language is limited to English or German, you see. With words, it is. But not with names. Names travel, you see. Mr. Hitler is a byword in New York, although he never set foot on this -- in this country.

So I -- will you kindly take way from my second part of my words today this strange fact, that from the very beginning of humanity, there has been a worldwide language built up of names? As far as these names--like Genghis Khan--were threats of murder and death, or as far as they were promising life of the future, they testify to the essential unity of all speech through all countries. And this is very hard today to sell in a time of nationalism, where people have -- rave about the English Bible, which nobody can any longer understand, because it was after all translated in 1611. And Shakespeare is even more easily understood than the contest of the King James Version. But we cling to the beautiful English. I have several friends who call themselves Anglicans, but they are just drunk with old English. And if you would take them -- and if you would take them up on the content of that book, they would be desperate. I mean, they have no intention to be Christians, but they have all the intentions to be Jamesians, you see. And this is, of course, the great suffering of the -- of the clerical, ecclesiastical bodies in our -- in this country and all over the world, that they by far prefer the shell to the content.

Names, however -- can't let them rest. You know, the saints, and the name, Jesus and Mary Himself, and Judas Iscariot, they are there, even if they entrench themselves behind the old English. The unfortunate thing about these names are that they may exert on one of the faithful an influence which the bishop of New York doesn't want them to exert. You see, he wants to be safe and see the people in church. That's all he wants. But these people go out and say, "Oh, I have to be a Christian on weekdays." That's very disturbing for any ecclesiastical authority. It upsets the applecart. It upsets the applecart of replacing the religious content of promising names, you see, by the archaic character of the language in which the facts ab- -- of these people are reported.

Any one person then who embanks to speak of the absent, of past and future events, decides where he stands. Does he embark on the future? Does he cling to the past? Because you can't -- as I told you, the very word "was," "is," "shall be" decides. That's why a faithful person will never fall for being, for this

modern philosophy of being, of essences, and so, because the philosopher in his cleverness, you see, has cut out the decisive element of speech which distinguishes between "was," "is," and "shall be," and puts you into the middle of this decision and says, "I want you to tell me: is this to you the past or is it still a promise for the future? Or is it a present power in your own life?"

The philosopher says, "I don't know. We speak of being. We speak of essences." If you look at this word "being," you see it as a stripped of its temporal quality. You can't see the -- the tense involved, you see. It's abstract, as we call this. So we learn: abstractions are utterances deprived of the date in life, in history. All speech is the creation of history, of continuity, through different tenses in grammar, by applying them to the times of history. Philosophizing means to abstract from the date, from the birthday of a thought, from the birthday of the name of Jews, as in -- in the Old Testament, or of the marriage of Ruth to Boaz, against the law.

So all concrete thinking, which is totally unknown to you, is dated. And that's its honor. And the curse of the -- modern thought is that when you call something dated, you think you -- you condemn it. Something is dated, you see, is obsolete. Isn't that a strange idea? But I assure you, that when you celebrate the birthday of your sweetheart, the date is the whole difference. You don't celebrate an abstract, but this is the day in which you testify to your affection, and the date is the greatest honor, the most important part of the whole celebration. You don't celebrate him in the abstract or in your dreams, but you take the whole day out; and you lose even perhaps some income, you see, by giving a lesson, or something like that, because it's so important to you.

I was very tickled that someone here in this hall was kind enough to tell me that she cut a physics class in order to listen to me, you see, because this cannot be repeated. I am here today, and not tomorrow.

All life, you see, is predicated by death. And the whole value of life is that you take the date seriously. And all philosophy has -- can never say anything important about humanity because in philosophy, the date is deprec- -- depreciated. It's like depreciation in the income tax, you see. It's worth less because it has a date. In real life, it is worth more; because your wife is alive today, and tomorrow she might be dead, and you'd better make peace with her today.

"Dated" is the betrayal of the last 300 years, and their little arithmetic, and their little geometry, and even their higher mathematics. Because they have stepped on the toes of this mighty giant, time. And we are nothing but little cells in this tremendous body of time, which goes on by our creative effort as a unity.

If you think of a baby lying in the cradle, this child has no time sense, except for the second. You already have some time sense, because you want to pass an examination. So at least most of you can think in terms of one term. For the rest, you are rather flippant; and long-range thinking is not your part. If your parents or your grandparents tell you what has happened 90 years ago, in 1865, when the Republic was in danger, you can hardly imagine that you should behave like the voluntary soldiers in 1865. But some do. The Peace Corps is based on the assumption that people even 90 years later can still realize the immense danger for the disintegration of this mighty republic, you see, if people want to be masters and not be -- voluntary servants.

So there is an eternity about the time element which has to be learned. Time has to be learned. And we speak so that we may learn it; so that we may say "1962" with some serious understanding that at this moment--and it's obvious that it is--the situation is very much like the Civil War in this country. If you read the news from France, you can fathom what it means when the nations of the last 200 years fall into civil war. It's a very tragic news which you read in Algiers, where two -- two courageous groups, you see, shoot each other every day. Don't tell me that this couldn't happen one day in Mississippi.

All the peaces of the world will become dated, in the geometrical sense of Mr. Spinoza or D‚scartes, if you not reinstall them, reinstitute them. Man's life on this earth is built up of the constant reinstitution of the peaces already concluded and the adding of the next peace that is now needed. You see, we live in a world, as you -- you know, as of this moment, where peace has not been concluded. You call this a kal- -- cold war, but the foolishness of the whole thing is that we -- we try to be enemies with the Russians when in fact we can't, because they have been our allies in the last war--even in the last two wars, you must admit. And it is absolutely -- hypocrisy to say that they are our enemies. It's very cheap. It only means, you see, that we do not want to introduce the peace treaty which would have to follow this world war, and add to all the former peaces that have been concluded. Just as marriage which you conclude add to the marriages your parents, your grandparents, you see, your great-grandparents have concluded, and which have built up your family tradition, so in the same manner, peaces are -- exist in a sequence. The next peace must be concluded, or all the previous peaces are in danger of going to pieces, of being shattered.

This is very important. And you don't -- unfortunately you don't read this in history books because history books are written without speech -- any secrecy or any understanding of the great majesty of one speech through all the ages. The fact that you can't murder any one person in this room, although you may have a pistol in your pocket, is the achievement of the great peace of land achieved by and large 400 years ago in Europe. You have just accepted this, that

peace -- people meeting in one room, you see, are obliged to hold the peace. You don't know what this -- how difficult it was to establish peace between people of so many different languages, religions, races as sit in this room. That's a tremendous achievement. You have accepted it. That's America, you say. Yes, but it has been paid for by tremendous wars of the human race until the redeeming word was spoken: "We are all Americans." As you know, in 1776, that was far from being the case. And the word "America" to this day is very ambiguous, because you don't know whether the Mexicans or the Brazilians are included. You call these "Americans," but it's a very ambiguous term. You see, it's still to be filled with content, even today.

Now I mean to say, you are in the midst of a desperate -- or never say "desperate." When I read -- I read it too often in the papers. When a man tries to sip a glass of water: "he made a desperate attempt to -- to drink water." So desperation today is too common. Let me not use the term. Well, but you -- we are making a groping effort to end the two world wars by one peace.

You must remember that since 1914, the world is at war, and peace has never been concluded. And if you do into think about this, you will not understand what speech can do, and you will not understand the history of the last 50 years. Because your fictions -- is that peaces have been concluded, that there was peace between 1919 and 1939, which is completely untrue. The United States went home, as you know, from Versailles and said, "Oh, the war has never happened. Let's forget about it. Make merry, you see, and have Charlie Chaplin."

And so the Depression came, which is a part of the World War I--1929, you see, because we -- you poured money into the -- into Europe, $50 million -- billion dollars, and they could never be repaid because -- they were bled white from the First World War. And then this made the Depression, this made Hitler, this made the Second World War.

You can always understand history if you believe in living speech, in peace, the conclusion of peace. But you can never understand history if you read about conferences at the top or the -- at the bottom. Or if you read these so-called news in the papers. They have nothing to do with the great fact that death stalked around -- over the earth twice in our generation -- in my generation--not in yours; and that peace has never been concluded. And even worse than this, the wars in the second -- at the second time broke out without declaration. And it is very difficult to heal the wounds made by the breach of promise, the breach of names, the breach of peace, you see, as it has happened when Hitler attacked Russia, you see, without a declaration of war. How can one trust each other? You see it.

The problem of Mr. Hitler, for example, and -- is missed by Mr. Shirer, I think, totally. I have nothing against the man's book. But the interesting fact about -- Mr. -- Hitler is something quite different. The simple fact is that he went to war, to total war without knowing that nobody was able to -- to make peace with him. Because he did everything to tell the Americans, the English, that they couldn't trust him.

Now the secret of going to war is that despite the fact that you are at war, you must still trust your enemy, you see, to that extent that you are able to write a peace treaty with him. If he has destroyed even this remnant of con- -- trust and confidence, you will have to put your foot on his neck; that's all you can do. And that was the situation of Germany in 1945, and the tragedy, therefore, was not that there was war. The Americans would be in Hell if was damnable in itself; it isn't. But it has to be declared in our era. We talked about this before, you see. And if you abolish the speech that can mark the distinction of peace and war, then you are indeed in a bad way. And we -- so we live now in the twilight of the gods in a situation between peace and war.

The last thing I have to tell you or to show you is that speech transforms us really into carriers of life and death by making us into persons. You all have heard something about persons in some wrong connection, but you think you are persons. Of course you aren't. Because only he is a person, or she is a person who can alternate between "me," and "you," and "we," and "they." The life of speech is that you and I are projected into reality as between the cemetery of corpses and the glorious future of the heavens by always taking sides and listening to the great truth where we are. If I speak of you as "they," I treat you as objects of my reflection. "These people," I say, "don't understand one word of what I am saying," and I therefore treat you as though I was the master and overlording you and had to, so to speak, follow suit to my judgment. Most people judge all the time in this manner about their neighbors, you see. They know and the others are "they."

"Oh, these people around the corner, these people next door, they amount to nothing. Imagine what they have done! They had two cocktails at once." And this kind of "they" judgment to you is the beginning of speech. Most people think today that a sense that begins with, "It rains," is the foundation of speech. I can prove this. The greatest Egyptologist of our days, Allen Gardner, has written a book on language in which he begins to elucidate the meaning of the sentence, "It rains."

All religious experience, and all vital experience, all power to jump out of the death that surrounds us of dead routines, dead emotions, dead environment, dead politics, begins with a command. The one experience by which you know that you are a person is if you can understand that you are told to do something.

"Get up," was -- St. Augustine was told, and he became a Christian. "Get up," I tell you, if I want to make sure that you are willing to listen. And he who has not listened cannot speak, because the tradition of speech has to come into you by your listening to somebody who has spoken before you. You cannot begin to speak. But the people in -- sitting in judgment about their neighbors' bad habits, they are all gossipers who begin speech by sitting in judgment on God's own throne and say, "They" or "It."

Anybody who says, "It rains," says thereby that it isn't Zeus who thunders, and it isn't Vulcan who sends the fire or the earthquake. But it's just "it." It's the weather, you see. And he can become a meteorologist and always predict the wrong weather. Because whenever we call something "it," we may treat it objectively and scientifically. Whenever you hear a command and say, "I have to do this. Let's go quick, and do it," you are under orders of a divine power and you are the little something just to be created into the officeholder of God Almighty. It's a great honor to be allowed to obey.

Any soldier I prefer to any free-lance writer who doesn't take orders, except from the money-making proposition on the newsstand. To obey is the first experience by which you are sundered -- you are separated from your family, clan, for the class, in the group. Here you sit, 78 people strong, I am told. Well, if I ask any one of you to get up and close this window there, this person is singled out, you see, by being expected to do something which the others have not listened to, have not attended to, you see, and do not care for. It is this caring for some part of the world to be changed which makes a man into a person, because he suddenly undergoes--there's a wonderful word, is -- he undergoes, you see, the great experience of having a commission, of being entrusted with something; unless it is done, the world is the poorer for it, or the deader, or the more in danger.

So anybody who is -- would stand on guard here in the front of this room would have a greater honor in my eyes than anyone who can afford to sit here. Because this man is doing something for you, you see. And you are only doing something -- Heaven knows, I leave it open.

And -- now this is important. The distinction between the secular mind and the religious mind is that the religious mind accepts the fact that life as a person begins by the experience of an order. And if you think of your baby time, as a child--you know this very well--that the great fact is that somebody called you out by your own name and asked you to do something. By this, you -- left behind this gray matter of indifference and nothingness and the kindergarten, or the -- whatever it is, and became somebody who could say "no" or "yes." He could obey the order or he could resist it. And any child makes this great experience of

the -- of an -- of being a person by saying, "no," usually to an order, usually to a very wholesome order. But the child just wants to experience the power to say "yes" and "no." So let us make it this way. The beginning of personal speech is the power to say "yes" and "no."

Now, "yes" and "no" you can only say to orders. Therefore, the wonderful thing about the universe is that it is full of orders. In the famous play by Rostand on the Chanticleer, on the cock, you see, the greatest moment is when the -- the cock hears the command to crow, and he is tempted not to crow. But he has to crow, otherwise the morning cannot break. That's very profound, you see. The whole creation is geared on this discipline and order that the parts of creation, the creatures do what they are expected to do. Don't laugh off this. It's a very profound notion of the poet, of -- Edmond Rostand, you see, that he feels this Chanticleer, this cockerel is doing his duty. He understands that the sun cannot rise, and he says so, unless he crows, you see. This goes together.

Well, it's with all of us the same way. The world is full of commands. And blessed -- he who hears his command that's coming to him. And that's the whole drive of your whole life. I mean, what else is important? That you understand which order of the day is -- cannot be fulfilled unless you attend to it, and nobody else. And there is an order of rank in -- among the orders of society. The lowest order is that which everybody has to do: not to murder, not to shoot, not to commit adultery, et cetera. These are the Ten Commandments. They are applying to everybody in a negative sense. But there are commands, you see, which only one man can heed because nobody else is aware of the necessity that this should be done. And you will think of any great man's life, it is that he hears a command as the first, and the others have not yet perceived it, you see, and don't even understand why this fool is rushing to his own doom. Usually a man who fulfills a command for the first time in humanity is doomed. Think of the end of Columbus. You always fight for his honor and his glory, and have the Knights of Columbus. But in fact he was put in prison and in chains; and that's the end of Columbus. No glory. Ignominious end. It is necessary for a man who hears a command for the first time. Because the rest of the -- world does not understand how magnificent his achievement is.

To hear the orders of God Almighty--don't be betrayed--is a very costly enterprise. And in very rare cases do the people survive this. Jesus didn't. He had to go to the Cross once He had heard the command. What was needed was that there should be no division between Jews and Greeks. You couldn't do it cheaper than to die. But the command -- hearing the command is the important thing about Jesus. The price is the usual price. Anybody who does his duty -- in the eyes of man is a fool. That doesn't mean that he must not fulfill his duty. He has to hear the command, because the first re-conquest of vital speech is by hearing a

command and saying, "I shall do it."

The In- -- Hindus have a wonderful description of this mysterious relation of language in the future and in the past. They tell the story of a father who says to his three sons: "Sons, go out and bring in twigs so that we can make a fire." And the great grammatical question is: what is the correct answer to this command? And the grammarians have excelled in inventing possible answers, one of course: "Yes we shall do so, Sir," and another: "I have a cold. I can't go into the woods," and so on and so forth. Pretext, responses, you see, "Yes, Sir; yes, Sir," "Thank you," or "With delight," or whatever you say when you don't want to do something, but feign that you want to do it. But the In- -- Hindus, who had still a real discipline of life, had a wonderful explanation. You know what the correct answer to the order is: "Break the twigs." Does nobody know? Sir, couldn't you tell me? No? The correct answer is, "Father, the twigs are broken."

And with this, we have reached the heart of the matter. Why? You can suddenly see that speech surrounds an act. It precedes it and it looks back on it. History is the looking back at orders executed, you see. Laws, and commands, and morality, and religion are acts seen before they are done. The very two forms of the verb, "broken": "Sons, break the twigs," and the answer, "It is broken," relate as future and past to each other, and that's why we speak.

You will never understand language if you analyze a single sentence. You will only understand the miracle of language if you see that "break" and "broken", "say" and "said" are the miraculous power of man to surround an event in such a way that it can be promised, can be demanded, can be prophesied, and it can be reported, and at the end, it even can be analyzed. And so we get the sequence: all speech begins with a "thee," "thou." God is not "thou" as they tell you today; but you are the "thou" that has to be a "thou" before you ever can become an "I." No child begins as an ego. That's one of the nonsenses of our modern so-called science. It is just as black as the -- as the teachings of the sorcerers of Pharaoh, that man is -- begins as an ego. He never does. Any child waits that his mother calls it out by name, and that's a "thou" situation, a "thee." That's why the Quakers rightly speak of speaking, you see, to each other as "thou" and "thee-ing," you see.

You are somebody in your own right after somebody has introduced you to reality by giving you an order: "Smile," "Keep dry," "Eat," "Drink," whatever it is--what the baby has to hear. That goes on in grown-up life, too. Here the registrar tells you, "Write your name right here," and you are a student of Barnard College. And unless you follow his order to write this name in there, you see, you aren't. That is, we all be- -- every verb of human- -- human speech has to have four tenses, or attitudes--or aspects, as we call it today in grammar. You

must be able to receive an order in this -- for this act; that's the imperative: "Love." Then you respond by undergoing this treatment of the command. And the children going to the woods, breaking the twigs, probably had a working song, and would sing, "Let's break the twigs; let's break the twigs," encouraging themselves to do this. And that is the only posi- -- just position for your ego.

The ego is in a mood. It's moody. It's the subjunctive and the optative, which is the real explanation for the existence of this so-called ego by which you are plagued. Don't believe that you are egos. In your fortunate existence, you are children of God Almighty because He is talking to you and giving you orders. And then in the anxiety of fulfilling His order, you may very well say, "Oh, let me alone," "Oh, poor me," "Oh, how did I come to do just this?" you see. Anybody executing an order is very restive un- -- until he has persevered. And in this moment, the word "ego" comes in the subject matter, and not outside of this.

And you believe that the ego is capable of objectivity. This is incredible. It's madness. You are not capable of objectivity, but you are very happy if you know that you are doing the bidding of your Father in Heaven--or on earth, by the way, or of your teacher. Everybody is happy who can fulfill a clear command. That's why soldiers usually don't have to be psychoanalyzed.

The third stage is that you can come home and tell your father, "Father, the twig is broken," or you -- they could also say, "We have broken the twigs." So the birthplace of the "we," of the community is the looking-back at an event done at great risk and at full investment of your own person.

When Charles Lindbergh flew to Europe, he came back, and he was a single flight -- this was a single flight, as you may recall. And he wrote his book and called it We. Because no decent man can report on the past with an ego. Don't believe in autobiographies where "I" is speaking. They are all lies. Doesn't exist--an honest autobiography. Mr. Charles Lindbergh was honest because he took his plane into his confidence and said, "Without the plane--the Eagle of St. Louis, you know, what was it, the --? You see? Wie?

(Spirit of St. Louis.)

Ja. "Couldn't have done it." And the -- President Taft made a very fine speech--I think it was Taft, or was it? No. Coolidge, it must have been. Coolidge, saying that the whole industry of the United States participated in this glorious achievement--the machines, the motor, everything, you see, you -- { } had to be -- I mean, produced by American know-how; and therefore he had every right to call his book We, because they were present in his achievement.

"We" is the form of history. "I" is the form of sentiment, of lyrics. And "thou" and "thee" is the form of command. You always enter the religious sphere when you have the right sequence: Thou, I, we. And then you can go into science, to the cemetery of our actions, and can analyze it. Wherever you speak of "they," "it," "she," "he," the people are dismissed from your immediate environment. They don't impinge on you. They are quiet, you see. You can judge them. They are lying there, you see, lying fallow. They have died. They can no longer interfere.

It is -- I am very sorry. I would love to speak on. It's a scandal to speak on language for three times only, because language is the eternal stream, the ocean of words, the life of the word in us, and around us. So thank you for giving me at least this opportunity.