Transcript
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{word} = hard to understand, might be this
Today is Tuesday, February the 22nd. And obviously, there are two great events in the history of the race to be remembered today. One is, you know, Washington's birthday. What -- which is the other date in the calendar today? Tuesday, 1954, February 22nd [actual date: Tuesday, February 22, 1955]. Has -- does anybody know? Well -- what? Don't you know it?
(Think it's your birthday -- )
It's your birthday?
(I said, "your birthday.")
{ } important event, but it isn't. Gentlemen, it's Shrove Tuesday. Shrove Tuesday is today. So you'd better -- are cheerful today and sorrow tomorrow -- sorry tomorrow. Shrove Tuesday. "To shrive" in Hamlet -- what does it mean, you know? What's a {shrivver}? Never hear of it? Shrove Tuesday? Well, gentlemen, in Europe it is to this day still a very important day. The season of the Fasching, of the gaieties, in all Europe ceases at midnight tonight. And then you put ashes on your head and on Shrove Tuesday you go for confession. Shrive -- Shrove Tuesday is the day in which you confess yourself fortnight before the -- for the 40 days of Jesus in the desert, when He was tempted by the Devil, are represented by the Fa- -- Lent, what you call Lent. That begins tomorrow, or at midnight, today. And so the last day of the season before Lent is called Shrove Tuesday. Formerly, of course, this was much more important than wanting { } for some good reason.
I have to deal today, gentlemen, with these holidays a little more extensively. As an introduction to the history of the human race, it is well to see that you are in a strange position, gentlemen, looking forward -- the great day of your life, your choice of profession, or your candidacy for the presidency of the United States, or your betrothal to a -- can -- are still ahead of you. All the great hours of indecision are looming large at the horizon. If you look into the future, it looks like such a line. What I want to point out today, to reason with you, is that in proportion as you are expecting still to do something in life -- and you cannot help having to do something in life -- you must also know what already has been done. And we tried it -- and I think the report was a good report in bringing this out -- we try to remember in extraordinary fashion, or in total fashion, the new qualities which the race has received in former times, because you and I have to keep this potential power ourselves. The 4th of July is a very simple example. You can hardly think of an American who doesn't know what the 4th of July is.
As soon as there was -- was a generation of Americans who would have forgotten the 4th of July, there would be no Americans. They could be then annexed by Nicaragua. They would have abdicated their birthright as Americans. That's very serious, gentlemen, because you live in an atmosphere -- it is changing in the last five or nine years -- of con- -- total depri- -- deprivation, of total degeneration into fragmentarism. All the doctrines -- we talked about this before -- which you imbibe in the newspapers, in psychology and sociology, over the radio, deal with fragmentary man, because they are polite. Now politeness is only going always from the outside. You want to be one of the fellows; you want to conform; you want to be nice; and you want to be treated nicely. If I tell you the truth, you say, "He -- this is impolite. This isn't done." And people don't like to be criticized. Then you just say, "This is just a critical European." Gentlemen -- as I was told last night. And you don't want to hear the truth. You want to hear caresses. Oil. {Blissery.} Sweetness, and light, and kind -- I gave you the example of the Clairemont Eagle, with his suppression of the facts about Dartmouth, because that wasn't light and sweetness, if he had brought the truth.
So gentlemen, somewhere there has to be a break in this tremendous constraint of your conformism, and an official constraint, not one just by drunkenness, but an official drunkenness with the greatness of life. Otherwise you will never come up to the same greatness in -- in your Valley Forge. So we have these holy days. And they -- if you look back at them, gentlemen -- you cannot help thinking of them as moving in a circle through the year. If you have here February 22nd, and I tell you that's one day in the American political calendar of -- of Washington's birthday, and it's another in the ecclesiastical calendar of Shrove Tuesday, you put it instinctively on the calendar of 365 days. And they move in a circle. And so the strange fact is that in looking backward through time, if you want to know what the past has done to you, you have not to look back as you always are taught now, by a kind of projection of mathematical idiocy or abuse, I would say -- mathematics is not idiocy, but this employment of mathematics is idiocy -- you look in the past as though they were 900 million of -- years of the past. Who cares for the 900 million years of the past? Nobody. But gentlemen, all workers in the world have had for the last 90 years a tremendous interest in the -- in Labor Day. In this country in 1882, a carpenter in New York proposed that when the central workers' union was founded, that there should be a Labor Day procession. And off they went in the streets protesting their right to celebrate labor's accomplishment, striking -- that is, laying down work -- and for another 40 years, there was on every Labor Day -- this was meant to be the first Monday in September -- a question: Who would participate? Because the rest of the society didn't like the idea at all. As you know, today it's a state holiday. You benefit more from Labor Day than the workers themselves, and it is all forgotten that this was a day of protest against the wrong done to labor. In the -- rest of the world, gentlemen, it isn't this very
peaceful proposition of the whole society, celebrating Labor Day in September, but it was the great idea of the May 1st. And in Germany, and in France, and in England, and in Italy, to demonstrate was very dangerous. The police would interfere. There were always riots. Down to 1918, and -- the 1st of May was an illegal holiday. That is, the manufacturers and the schools would take no notice; but the worker, the labor force of the country would institute this day.
May 1st, gentlemen, and Labor Day then are put in the calendar to remind people constantly of the coming rights of labor, and why were they however connected with May 1st in Europe, gentlemen? May 1st was the old day of the meeting of the tribes, of the warriors of the tribe for mating, and for getting their bride, and for going out to war. So the -- choice of Labor Day, gentlemen, by Marx, and by the Russian Bolsheviks, and by all the labor leaders -- by the way, also the non-Marxians in Europe -- had a tremendous significance. It said, in so many words: labor is the original man, is primitive man. He is that man before the division of labor. Now the division of labor is late, and has man corrupted into power, and capitalists, and monarchs, and tyrants, and priests. But primitive man, the man of the beehive, of the S- -- of the Sioux Indian, the man of the clans, there everybody was an equal. And you cannot imagine, gentlemen, -- I was introduced into pre-history not by history lessons, or by anthropological teachers, gentlemen, but by the demonstration of May 1st, when all the cit- -- bourgeoisie in Berlin would tremble in their shoes what would happen on this 1st of May. They didn't understand, but the workers idealized their own future by looking into the past and saying "Once before, May 1st was a great day of the calendar." And which was the time in which it was a great day? When all men were equal.
And so, by looking at May 1st in the calendar of 365 days, men were brought back to their unfragmentarized totality as being capable of anything, being the same in war and peace. And that's perhaps the greatest notion you should take down, gentlemen. It's man's deepest desire to be treated as the same man in war and peace. We always talk of equality, gentlemen. We are not equals. You and I are not equals. Nobody is an equal of anybody else. But he all -- with a deeper yearning of democracy is that a man cannot be demanded to serve his country in war if he isn't a knight of labor -- of Columbus, in peace -- times of peace. He wants not be sent to death on a battlefield as a -- as a GI, and be honorable enough to be expected there to die as a hero and then be treated as a cog on the wheel in a factory. He wants to be the same whole man at -- in peace and in war. And that's a great -- the real trial of democracy, gentlemen. Can we do this? Can we afford it?
You know, the whole New Deal of the last 20 years is nothing but a recognition that all the Americans were drafted and had to go to war in World
War I, and that when the Depression came and it was just impossible to forget about this fact and to say, "You are just private citizens, and since you have no property, I'm sorry." They had to have -- get property, so they got it. And now it's recognized, even the Republicans -- every one of them knows that you can't go behind the two world wars. They are just there as a fact that a man is a soldier and a worker in the same person. And because he's a worker and a soldier, we all today celebrate Labor Day with a very -- so to speak, great equanimity. It is no longer anything very revolutionary. But on May 1st, 1884, when the first celebration of Labor Day happened in New York, gentlemen, the police were summoned, and the people were very doubtful how it would come off. Mr. McGuire, I think that was the man of the hour, the hero who invented in -- this in New York anticipated, by the way, a celebration -- the cele- -- or the parallel in Europe, and it shows you the good nature of Americans that the 1st of May celebration in Europe has always been much more of an obstinate class-war holiday, against the existing class, you see, whereas you don't even know that Labor Day has ever meant anything to a special group more than to {any other}. Wouldn't you agree? To you, Labor Day is just a very peaceful occasion. Would you -- or did anybody feel this before, that Labor Day was a provocation? It's hard to imagine here.
So America has -- is better off. I mean, here -- never have these rifts between the various classes gone so deep. But gentlemen, the situation of workers in America in the 19th cent- -- the 19th century were much worse in -- in Europe, in part. And it is only the tremendous flexibility and the kind of escape into the frontier which always mitigated the situation in the Pennsylvania coal mine. But if you go into a Pennsylvania coal mine and you go to the Ruhr, you'll find that the Ruhr worker has much more safety and much more care than he has -- receives to this day in Pennsylvania.
So Labor Day, gentlemen, is the newest holiday in the great chain of human holidays, who re-acquire a human faculty, and -- or insist on a human faculty. And I told you, Labor Day insists on the equality of the warrior and the worker in every one of us. This is the real theme of our times, gentlemen. Don't be betrayed by all these slogans of communism, and capitalism, and liberalism, and socialism, gentlemen. They are all hiding the fact that the craving has been equality between the warrior in us and the worker. Because the worker -- the soldier, the fighter, the happy warrior, is always -- the -- all-around man, the unfragmentarized -- unfragmentarized man, the worker is always the specialized man, just the carpenter, or the paper worker, or the paper hanger, or the farmer. That is, he does something, you see, some skill, something beside -- separate. And somebody is always -- in any piece of work, gentlemen, has to do the opposite to make it come true. You have to have a clerk in the office before you can work on the assembly line. The clerk in the office have to has a salesman on the road,
before he can take down any accounts on his ledger. The salesman on the road needs the engineer who gives -- tells you what he shall -- can produce and what he can sell. And on it goes, gentlemen. The tragedy of modern man is this incredible -- what you call complexity or division of labor -- which is first described, as you know, in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations about producing the famous -- the famous needle, how you can produce so many needles in mass production if you subdivide work.
Well, gentlemen, this is choking your own effort, because you will be a -- a cog on the wheel and you will be -- just being the 175,000th insurance agent of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, you are in great danger of getting lost in a dead-end street. The warrior, you see, has the opposite situation. He brings you back to the greatest faculty in man in the beginning of history. What's the greatest faculty in man? That he can quire -- can acquire all human faculties. The man -- way of 1st -- May 1st I think will loom large in the next thousand years as the greatest holiday of them all. You can perhaps introduce it besides Labor Day, which reminds us that man is capable of anything, that there is no stopping for man. I mean, here is the -- the hod-carrier and he can become president. And there is -- {Gloria} Stokowski and he may become a singer. Can't he?
I mean, the housewives in this country think all -- they must become professional -- go professional. Strange idea. Between wife and professional woman, you have the same relation as between worker and soldier. In this country, the ladies want to be specialists. They all want to go into business. Go out to work, not to have to cook. In the worker, it was the opposite. Their emancipation consists in becoming all-around warriors who can do anything as men. We -- of course, the professional worker is so tame. He's tamed into -- like a little bird in the cage. So women and workers are in a strange inter-penetration or interchange in our society, gentlemen. If you look at the American women, they all say they can't be happy before they haven't, you see, been divided up by labor. And if you look at labor, they can't be happy before they haven't experienced some nice looting in Japan.
I once received a letter by a Mexican -- the Mexican minister of labor. Very great fellow, {Beteta}, who has been -- he is not in this government now. He was the minister 10 years ago -- 15 years ago. And he wrote to me, "You must understand the Mexican revolutions, in their right potential." And you know the Orozco frescoes are very ex- -- well explained in this letter, by indirection. He said, "Why have these revolutions to be? They are bloody, they are quite wasteful. But you must understand that the insipid life of a peon, of a Mexican peon, had to be interrupted by something that made him feel that he was a man, and if you have this existence of a -- a peon, you will understand that the social revolution just is this man's holiday."
Don't ridicule this, gentlemen. If we go on with our division of labor, it is very natural that people begin to talk of the Third World War. The one and the other are intimate relations. If you cannot integrate a human life outside his drab existence of everyday by some great experiences, man will be driven to explosions. In this country, I don't think they will be so much the -- the explosions of war or of revolution, but of anarchy, I mean. They will be Mr. {Robles}, where hundred thousand people line -- in the streets around Harlem to see a man shot dead. The hundred thousand may they make you think what a beast man is if he isn't satisfied with his lion-hearted character. I think Mr. {Robles} and the police -- that's not -- beside the point. But the hundred thousand people who looked at it, gentlemen, that makes you shudder. And that makes you despise humanity. The hundred thousand cannot be forgiven. They are wrong. And you don't know this, gentlemen, that the terrible thing about sports and so on are the spectators, not the sportsmen, because they become cruel. They become hard-boiled, and they become sensationalists. And they {give} anything for seeing bloodshed, for something terrific, something exciting. And that makes you -- your blood {curdle}, that man can become so depraved.
It's the same as I told you with the burlesque show, that people can see another woman -- a woman strip herself, if you want to give -- love a woman, go to bed with her. But don't look at a woman stripping herself. That's indecent. That's obscene. That's terrible, and such a civilization is doomed, gentlemen, that you can never do anything with people who have fallen to such depths as going into a burlesque show. They can do it once, but then they must say, "Never again." If they go regularly, gentlemen, or more than once, you -- they are counted out of -- of history.
And that's how you live, gentlemen, you -- because we have no relation between peace and war, and between this great man in us -- who is total, who can do anything -- and the fragment. And you have these substitutes in between. Here you are fragmentarized, then you go and look at somebody else being shot dead. That's sensational. And that's what you -- we are all suffering for in this peaceful society, gentlemen. To me, peace is more horrible than war, because the horrors of war are obvious. Nobody defends war. But the horrors of peace, you defend. You defend these hundred thousand people who looked at Mr. {Robles}' shooting. And you cannot even talk to people. The -- ever -- a sense of values is destroyed. They don't know that they are wrecking the foundations of civilization. They should go to church and weep over Mr. {Robles}' death. Do something, but not -- not stand there and look. When you see a riot, and a mob, gentlemen, go away. You have nothing to do with them. It's the coward in you who does this. That is, a vicarious living, as with the burlesque show. You don't dare to do anything, so let somebody else do it for you. Yes?
(How do you compare that with spectators in sports? There are a lot -- )
Well, normal -- I have nothing against the normal spectator. I only say the more the masses are -- you have a hundred thousand boys in the Rose Bowl looking at. They begin to shout more -- to ask for more efficiency in the -- if this is more efficiency, it's also more cruelty. The hand -- game will become more coarse, so to speak, all the time, you see. You will -- as in baseball. All the rules are off, you see. In tennis -- in the tennis court, not as many people will look at you. It's a much more refined game, much more chivalrous. And the degree of chivalry depends very much on the mass of spectators. In the circus of Rome, in the colosseum, you see, they had to have the wild beasts eating up the Christians, because they could seat 60,000 people. They wouldn't come, you see, and pay no entrance fee for less. The more you want to draw, the more vulgar your pleasure has to become. For -- a -- quartet by -- by Beethoven, you can't get 60,000 people. So it can be good music. But for a march by Sousa, you can get anybody.
So gentlemen, we are back to the holiday. The holiday, gentlemen, is the legitimate exuberation of the total man. On May 1st, what is celebrated is real, because it's myself who is celebrated, who is restored to his proper glory. I am reminded that I can do anything, that I am as well the warrior of the tribe, that I am the cornerstone of the -- of the institution of my people, and so I feel very good. I march there, you see, like the -- on St. Patrick's Day -- the Irish, when they think that really they are American. And perhaps they are on such a day. It's a great thing to have this St. Patrick Day.
That I know very well, gentlemen. You think holidays are obsolete. They have no power over us. We -- here, I have to lecture to you on February 22nd. The mailman is the only man in this town who is allowed to celebrate, you see, because federal government had at least said that {although it hasn't to}, you know the federal government can declare no holiday. It's just -- for the mail. It's not a universal holiday. It's for the mail and by the states. And we don't celebrate. The college has its own holidays, Carn- -- Winter Carnival and such days.
(Sir, in the last lecture, you were -- you said this country was destroying itself -- destroying its character because we create holidays.)
Because we --?
(Now if we -- because we were creating holidays, like Father's Day and Mother's Day. Now --)
Well, because they are arbitrary, you see. That's the -- you can't create holidays. They must be -- they must be, you see -- come from suffering and from necessity. Father Day and Mother Day is very well for buying carnation {plants}. It's an invention of the Chamber of Commerce. That's a caricature of a holiday. That's what it is.
Now in my book, The Driving Power of Western Civilization, gentlemen, I have given you an example of one great holiday, which again in this country has disappeared, but which in the rest of the world is still an important holiday, the day of all souls. That's November 2nd. And I have also -- I think given you there an example how such a holiday can be treated, and how exciting it can become. And I think that if you want to understand history, gentlemen, you can only do it -- because history is too ample today, and too large, and too vast, and too complex -- by asking yourself about the holidays in every community, and trying to understand their coming about. You understand the United States very well when you look at the character of July 1st -- of July 4th, of Thanksgiving, of the strange half-hearted celebration of Washington's birthday, and of Lincoln's birthday. Poor Lincoln, of course, had bad luck. He comes two days before Valentine Day, and 10 days before Washington, so people aren't quite sure if they should celebrate it.
And so the -- the -- the degree of seriousness, gentlemen, by which we allow a day to interrupt our affairs is very important. A real holiday is only a day that is a bigger day than the ordinary day, and that shows by the fact that it has to be at least two days long in the physical world. As you know, we have done this with Labor Day. We have put it in such a way that it is -- comes after Sunday. And so you have always, you see, more than one day.
Who has taken Philosophy 40 with me? Quite a number. You remember I gave you there this Time-Bettering Day. That's an expression by Shakespeare. "Time-bettering days" for the progress made by such great events. And "timebettering day" is a very wonderful word, only once occurring in a Shakespeare sonnet. It's too precious for me to go -- to go into this paper of time-bettering days, but some of you have it. The others can ask them and read it. What I want you to do during this term, gentlemen, is -- every one of you -- to pick one date in the calendar, be it Shrove Tuesday, or be it Washington's birthday, or be it May Day, or whatever you pick out of the calendars of the Catholic or Jewish tradition, or the political tradition of America, or the Protestant -- Protestant tradition, like Thanksgiving Day, and get behind the scenes of such a day and see how it was introduced with blood, sweat, and tears into the life of the community.
You must not think that a holy day is a pleasurable day. The day -- the whole
man is not a pleasurable or a happy animal, but he is a great being. He is very divine. The divinity of man is discovered on his great days. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were in great danger of life. They practically -- many of them lost their fortunes. Their -- parts of the country in which some of them lived were destroyed. They had no happy life, gentlemen. But they have given this country the divine spirit of -- still existing today. You must not look into -- for any compensation in dollars and cents for any act of the total man. The total man lives beyond your worries for ice cream, or for Cadillac. They are never interested in the standard of living, but they are interested in the shape of life, which is something very different from the standard of living, gentlemen. In the shape of life, in the nature of man -- or we -- may say it a little stronger, gentlemen -- since every holiday reminds you of an acquired faculty of the human race, on a holiday, man remembers a change of his nature. On a holiday, a -- men remember a change of their nature. That's against all the platitudes of today of your textbooks that man is always the same: rational, timid, and out for the selectivity. He is not, gentlemen. He acquires new faculties all the time. You just have to think of these -- this heroic doctor who -- who tried out at what speed you could go through the air. You have seen -- heard of this experiment. And all his -- the pilots will benefit from this man's, you see, power to expose himself to a new limit of human courage. And probably many of you and certainly the next generation will inherit these acquired quality, because people under their -- without such an experiment would never dare to do this. And of course, you all know we do a lot of things. We go on a bicycle and before the bicycle was invented, nobody would have believed that you could do it.
These are the minor qualities, I mean, new qualities. But gentlemen, a holiday is day in {which} we remember a change of human nature. Now, as you know, since 1859, since this strange book of -- by Mr. Charles Darwin appeared on the -- on the origin of species, people celebrated holidays. With industry, the rhythm of the human calendar was destroyed. And so the book marks the moment in which the machine destroyed any memory of the acquisition of new faculties, because it destroyed the rhythm of the human year. Those of you who have taken Philosophy 9 know how other consequences have gone with this destruction of the calendar of humanity. You despise the calendar. You think that's just -- should be regular, it should be pedantic, it should be iron-clad, every month -- there should be 13 months -- every month with the same number of days. That you call the calendar.
Gentlemen, that's not the human calendar. The hu- -- the calendar is the way of looking back in a human fashion and there seeing the past all spread and projected on a cycle of the year. And then it enables you to concentrate for the forward movement in the form of a straight line. If you go, however, to the modern man, logician or whoever it is, he thinks of the past as 900 million, and of
the future as a vicious circle, leading to the Third World War, or to panic, or saying everybody has a complex, and he goes from one complex all the time to the next complex, you see. If the unfortunate man has a -- has a -- has a mother and a father and six sisters, he has to -- to murder and to sleep with every one of them. That is his -- the picture that gives you modern psychology of man's freedom for the future: it's slavery, enslaved by his urges. And in the past, it was just one long drab line of natural evolution.
Gentlemen, this is the -- your sick soul. You have before you the drabness of the routines of being an employee in one big corporation for the next 40 years. And there you will go and work 2,400 hours every year. You will get fortnight of vacation, and if time goes on, you have three weeks. And then you can beak some china. But then -- for the rest of the time, you can't break any china. You have no holidays in front of you. You just work in shifts. And that is your existence, as you really think it should be.
But looking backward, you go to Calgary, Alberta and into the natural -- into the park there. I never forget this. I had to spend a week in Calgary, Alberta. It's quite a punishment, and they have one thing. They have there a big park. And in their enthusiasm for biology they have established there these sauria, the plesiosaurus and the ichthyosaurus, in tremendous imitations. And for your comfort -- I was far from civilization. I had no money, that's why I was licked there, you see. I had to stay there before my -- until my money would arrive. And I walked every day into this park and what would receive me? A sign, "900 million years old." And another sign, "800 million years old." Sometimes they allowed only for a hundred million years old for such a beast. Gentlemen, that's perfectly inhuman. You are all made sick by this nonsense. Nobody knows, by the way, these figures. I don't believe in any one of them. That's the myth of our days. These scientists, they have to have their fairy tales, too. And don't -- they don't tell you anything. What does it mean by 900 million years? It's just an invention of the Devil.
But gentlemen, a human being should live in the past as in its own home. And you are at home when you celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas and May 1st, and all the other great days of the calendar. The past should look as a cycle. And the -- future should look as a straight line, or a jumping-off place. And you live in a perfectly perverted concept of time. That is your concept. I'm not exaggerating. The future for you looks blah, monotonous. And no conflict, and everything smoothed over and keep smiling. And all these recommendations -- what do they mean, you see? You know everything ahead. Now everything what is ahead of you already is cyclical, because it will be the same every day. Gentlemen, my life is still full of surprises. I'm twice as old as you, or more -- three times as old as you. But I have never known what the next day will bring. And I hope this will --
I hope -- can only hope that I will be that privileged to the end of my life. But I do look back to my birthday celebrations, and I do look back to my marriage anniversaries, and as any human being, I do look back to the days of my community and of the Church with great anticipation, because they return. I know there will be Christmas again. And that doesn't do any -- doesn't impede me for being very -- whole-hearted in celebrating Christmas. If you look at a day of the past, you love to have it firmly in the calendar. But if you look of your -- think of your own future, it must be absolutely, you see, right in front of a tunnel of a high mountain. And you don't know how to penetrate and how to -- how to blast the next path. That must be hidden. But most employees today know ahead of time what will be their task for the rest of their lives, unless a machine is -- is suddenly invented and throw them out of work and then they're -- unemployed. That's not a cheerful -- cheering experience, either, or expectation.
Gentlemen, we'll try to reverse the process. Make your future obscure. Keep it dark, unknown, and you can live. But make -- brighten up the past. You hate the past. You forget it. You have nothing to do with the past. Who knows -- not one of you knew that today was Shrove Tuesday. You are very poor. You have lost all your capital of human enjoyment of -- from the past. You don't glorify, you don't -- dance around the Maypole. You know the Puritans killed this. Well, you must have some other { } to dance.
The bonfire's just for the moment. They aren't the right thing. The old people celebrated St. John's Day as you know on June 24th, because it was the return of the sun to her full power. And St. John the Baptist was at the other end of the year from Christ Himself, and on December 24th, you had Christmas; and on St. John's Day, you had the fires.
I'll give you in -- a proof that we have lost the power of celebrating holidays, gentlemen. If you celebrate a holiday, you are just as anxious to dis-establish itself and to put away its vestiges than to keep it, than to celebrate it. That is, if you have a Christmas tree, it has to disappear on January 6th. In this country, you can go and find the first Christmas illumination on Thanksgiving Day and the last last Christmas electric light or Happy Christmas on -- on Easter, because that means they have no respect for the holiday whatsoever. You cannot expand a celebration of a holiday without watering it down. You can celebrate a holiday whole-heartedly if it's only one day, or two days, I mean. Bigger day, certainly. Or a week, Twelfth Night, yes. But you cannot celebrate a holiday for three months without showing that you have forgotten what a holiday is. Can you see this? You cannot.
It would be like the priest in the Catholic Mass not washing his chalice at the end of the Mass. That's a part of the dishwashing, and a part of the having had a
meal. It's very important that he should -- before your eyes, the eyes of the faithful -- every Catholic priest has to wash the dishes. And don't laugh, gentlemen. That's the greatest part of the Roman Mass. That makes it immortal, because it doesn't sell you the idea that you can have something for nothing. And a holiday costs work, dirty work. And therefore it has to be cleaned up, the mess. But this is against all the style of the worldling. The worldling wants to go into the theater and just see the limelights. And then somebody else has to clean up after him, all the peanuts he has thrown away.
No, that's why going to the movies is not a holiday, because you buy something. You buy your way in there. If you -- a holiday, gentlemen, can only be done by people who also participate in the chores of the holiday. If you would stay at the movie theater and pick up the peanuts yourself, you would become a part of the -- of the -- of the joy of living.
Very strange, gentlemen. He who doesn't pay the -- want to pay the price -- the penalty for the chores cannot share the joy. That's why the rich people have such a hard time to be joyful, because they can buy their {fellow}. That's the constant in- -- affliction, you see, which the -- of which the New Testament speaks. Nobody has anything against rich people, only they have such a hard time having a good time, because they can have everything. They can have too much.
So never try to get rich, gentlemen. It doesn't -- it doesn't make anybody happy. It's a curse. Some people have to be rich. I'm all for the rich, because they -- I -- that's why I can stay, you see, without riches. I'm just a professor. Yes, I'm benefiting from the capitalistic system, but the capitalists aren't, because they -- it makes a surplus so that I -- some people can give in to -- can't you see this? -- can study and be artists and so. Without the capitalist system, there would be poverty, and no wealth. But the people who have the wealth, they aren't the beneficiaries of the system. Never think that.
You didn't tell me. A break. { }.
[Tape interruption]
In -- in your tradition, then, of the last hundred years, there is at least in theory a gap, a total gap. You have been told by a rather inferior-looking science that you treat human history as you treat all the facts. This has led to this strange distortion as though we were indifferent to the past. We could look at the past with indifference, and to the future with apprehension. Gentlemen, the past is as much a part of your and my heartfelt solici- -- care, and worry. You have, as any American knows, he has sleepless nights whether this can remain a democracy,
whether there will be free elections for the next 50 years, or will they be rigged, or will there be a third party? Why do you worry? Because for 150 years, these people -- this country has been prosperous. Since the 4th of July, it has found a special way among the {nations} to live. The English have the 5th of November. On 5th of November, the great conspiracy of the -- what was discovered on November 5th?
(Fawkes. Guy Fawkes.)
Yes. Gunpowder Plot. "I remember, I remember the 5th of November. Who knows this verse, still? Who has heard of it? Only one? Well, they had a very good luck, the English. They had this is in 1605. The people tried to destroy king and -- in -- the king in Parliament. The whole succession was in question. James I, you see, had just acceded at the -- to the throne from Scotland, and everything was in a turmoil after Elizabeth, so the destruction of the whole Parliament with the king in -- inside it and the princes, and the nobility, and the Commons was, of course, a really terrifying thing. But on November 5th, 1688, the -- William III, the Prince of Orange, landed in Torbay, the southern shore of England, and became then by usurpation and conquest, and without any legal right in this socalled Glorious Revolution, the king of England. And so the English had the great good fortune to celebrate through the Gunpowder Plot Day at the same time the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That's unheard-of, that they could, you see, kill two -- one -- two birds with one stone. And that has made the 5th of November such a tremendous day in the calendar of the Anglican Church, and of the Commonwealth of Great Britain. It's a very special story the -- the way the British have -- so to speak, camouflaged the memory of their real achievement as parliamentary country against the king, by celebrating apparently his own being saved from the conspiracy 80 years before. You see what a -- what a cant. They're great in that. Great hypocrites. But the 5th of November is as central at the -- in the tradition of the British nation as the 4th of July is in this country.
Now I find there is a weakening of the 4th of July celebration since the firecrackers have been forbidden, and I'm sorry for this. It should be a dangerous day. Well, it's just like forbidding people to have -- to have candles -- real candles on a Christmas tree and having all the time short-circuits all the time with electric candles. And as we found out, there are many more fires caused by the electric candles -- lights on this Christmas tree than on -- by the open candles. I think it's good for -- for the electric -- the electric appliance companies. But it's not good for a Christmas celebration to have artificial light on a tree. You can't have { } either have a tree or have electricity.
Only it goes to show you how we are -- have become impotent of giving the due to a s- -- a holiday. A holiday entails of course certain risks, as a horse race
does. Can you abolish the jumping over a hurdle by a horse by saying it's too dangerous? You can legislate against horse racing in general, but you cannot take out this -- the cream of the horse race by saying, "No hurdle, too dangerous."
So I think we have done both. We have emasculated the holidays -- I mean this very s- -- strongly, you see. Emasculated -- they are limited to eating too much. And that's not a holiday. A holiday { } -- must have a ritual. You must know what to do on a holiday. At least you have to march -- the militia has to march and fire some shots. Otherwise there is no 4th of July celebration. I mean this, gentlemen. If a holiday is just sitting down, as some of you wrote in a paper for me last -- last final exam, that the turkey of the Thanksgiving dinner, you see, was not only stuffed, but stuffed you -- if that was -- is Thanksgiving, then don't have the Thanksgiving dinner. If it doesn't mean hospitality shown to a stranger whom you invite and make ho- -- feel at home in your family, and if it doesn't assimilate people to the American way of life, it has lost all meaning. And I -- you become so rich and -- that it is just a story how much confectionery, and how much turkey, and how much stuffing, and how much cranberry sauce. That's not a way of celebrating Thanksgiving. A very serious occasion. It could be. And it was the day on which, as I see it, into every American family there was introduced one man who hadn't yet found a home and hadn't yet put his feet under his own table and therefore was very glad to made -- be made welcome. But if it just becomes a self-centered, egotistical celebration of your own stomach, gentlemen, then you should get ulcers.
You have no right to celebrate if you don't do anything to a stranger on such a day. Any celebration -- why? -- is an embrace of the rest of humanity, because we have acquired a new quality again. And you can never celebrate anything for yourself. Holidays, gentlemen, are always religious holidays. You may not know this. You may think that you are not religious, gentlemen. But anybody who celebrates any holiday is for this reason a religious man, because religion is nothing but his being brought back to his totality. Nothing extra. We said the poison of the humanistic mind, on which you are brought up at this moment, is that he calls the extraordinary which is the normal, the total. And he calls the ordinary which is the fragmentary. You remember? That was after all the text of last time.
Today I want to tell you, gentlemen, that any holiday is an attempt to embrace all men. And every weekday is a day which divides you into your own vested interest: a wage earner, or salary earner, or capitalist or what-not. On your day of work, you must look out over your own desk or your own lathe what you have to do. Nobody else has to do. On a holiday you forget completely that you are specialized -- specialist. You are the whole man, but you can only be this if everybody else shows you that he feels like you. You would be weakened if --
you cannot celebrate a holiday by yourself. If you do, you show that you are very sick.
I give you a -- a great story. There was a professor of philosophy in Wrzburg, Germany. His name was {Fischer}. He was a Catholic priest. He was a prel- -- acquired the title of prelate, Monsignor. Well, because he had grown up to old age and he was going to be 70. And he was still going strong, and he was very proud of himself. And so he persuaded his -- his students -- who also probably were future priests, to -- because there's a Catholic -- it's a Catholic university -- that he should -- they should perform an oratory in -- on the day of his birth, 70th birthday. The 70th birthday is a very important day in Germany. It's much more important than in this country. It's -- all the great celebrations are -- of a life's time are, so to speak, heaped on the 70th birthday of a person. We come to this, because it has deep reason in the German tradition. The birthdays -- the 70th birthday is, so to speak, the -- the -- the greatest birthday of them all. And so he gave them the text. And they were willing to learn and to sing. But when they got the text, it began, in his own wording: "Hail to the great Prelate {Fischer}. Hail ..." you see, "... three Hail -- times Hail to the great Prelate {Fischer}."
So the poor man did try to celebrate himself, and was very funny and very tragic, because you can't. You cannot compose an ode into your own honor, can you? And it happened, and it shows -- just shows the tragedy of loneliness. The man was so alone that he said, "Somebody, at least, should mem- -- commemorate me, so I'd better do it myself."
This is very much in the American tradition, where you -- we -- Whistler, the painter, always said, "You have to write your own story. You have to appraise yourself." Well, I think it's terrible. You will agree. It's just terrible if a man at 70 has to praise himself. It's just a wasted {lie}.
This is quite serious, gentlemen, because we discover a -- a law of the relation of the holy day to the single day. On a single -- on a weekday, I like to be alone. On a real holiday, gentlemen, I cannot be alone. That is, the character of the holiday depends on its not being just my own, the holiday. My birthday is a holiday only if I find at least one soul who will celebrate with me, who is also overjoyed by the strange fact that I was born.
So gentlemen, will you take it down: We work ourselves; we cannot celebrate ourselves. Don't try. Don't try. Most people do. If they have money, the think they can celebrate. They cannot. If they do it too long, they all break down. I could give you in the -- among the American rich terrible examples where people have tried just to do this. You cannot celebrate yourself, gentlemen. The celebration is always one of the change -- of the change of a nature in man. Great
joy, great sorrow, great fear, great -- great triumph, you see, but it is not my triumph which you can celebrate.
Now to come back to the birthday problem which, you see, in your -- in your rich assembly of holidays you say -- think you can pick and choose, and you can have some nice day from the Christian -- Christian calendar, and some from the Jewish calendar, and some from the political calendar. But the great nations in Europe were limited in their choices, as the English have the 5th of -- 4th -- 5th of November, the Germans who are, as you know, split in -- even today in many, many fragments had only Luther's birthday. Luther's birthday is November 10th. And Luther's birthday became the outstanding day. And therefore the birthday celebration in Germany has always had a very different character from the birthday celebration in this country. You begin the day with celebrating. This is -- as far as I have known, nobody knows that you have to be waked up already with drums, or with some music. It's a great event in the morning. Here the children -- I -- as far as I've found out, they get something when they get home from school or something. It's not -- it's not a real, festive day. Just introduced, like the Christmas tree. But it's artificial, or it's half-hearted. It's not a glorious celebration. That's different.
In -- in Germany, it has always been considered a political question whether, for example, the community should celebrate the -- the day of a great man -- the birthday of a great man together with the king's or the prince's birthday. In Luther's -- in the consequence of Luther's birthday being celebrated, in every part of Germany the prince's birthday was celebrated. So the king's birthday -- "God Save the King" comes from that, of course -- the king's birthday, or the duke's birthday, or the emperor's birthday is the second holiday, in the German tradition. And that, of course, was in every region, every territory, only one. You couldn't celebrate the -- the birthday of the neighboring prince. That wasn't your concern. Luther's birthday is in every Protestant calendar of the world. It's the only birthday in any Christian calendar which is -- which is de rigeur, which is prescribed. As you know, in the Roman Catholic calendar, and the Greek calendar of the saints, which day is {there} -- celebrated?
[unintelligible]
Wie?
(Their birthday?)
Not their birthday, ever. Except for Christ, no birthday is celebrated in the Christian -- Church calendar. What?
[unintelligible]
Pardon me? The day of death. You are born for Heaven when you die. That's very important. I think every one of you should know this, especially all the people beginning with {Mac}.
Gentlemen, this is scandalous. You don't know this. You see, again the -- the calendar of the saints is a very important step in the celebration of acquired faculties, because obviously a man has only endowed humanity with a new faculty at the day of his death, and not in the -- on the day of his birth. If you are well-born certainly, that's not your merit, but your parents' or the civilization's merit. But if you die as a saint, or as a great {friend, yet} you have incorporated into society what you have done. And that is not true as at your birth. That's true at the end of your life. This is very important. And -- so the man made a -- mankind made a tremendous discovery when in Christianity it was said that you can only celebrate a man when he -- the moment when he has achieved -- has accomplished his path through his valley of tears, of -- of the earth. But in Luther's case it was a very different thing, you see. It was a throwing off of this -- of this training of the soul by the discipline of a visible Church. And the birthday of Luther has nothing to do with the celebrating of a -- the uncircumcised heart, or the natural -- nature boy, as you think, of Rousseau. Not man when born is great in Luther's conception of Protestantism, but man can pierce the armor of false rules. If he is rebellious, if he is courageous, if he is true to his God, the voice of his conscience will penetrate all false, amalgamated natures. And he'll come true to his better conscience, or a new conscience.
So the birthday of Luther is a very rebellious and renovating event in the history of the human soul. It doesn't celebrate, however, your body. You think your birthday is celebrating you for your -- for your physique. Luther's birthday is celebrated because here a man -- find his way back to a personal relation {to God}, that in his heart, there was also the Church. It could become visible, despite all the orders of the organized Church, which today no Roman Catholic would deny. The Roman Catholics at this moment are very much on the Lutheran side. As you know, all the Protestants are very eager to stress that they are churches. Very strange overlapping today of their two interests.
So in Luther's birthday, there is -- as I said, still a new quality acquired: the power of every human heart to establish itself as a new creature of God, but not every piece of nature, gentlemen. Don't believe this. In nature, we cannot celebrate anything, because it hasn't been newly acquired. It doesn't have to be celebrated. You haven't to celebrate the Niagara Falls. If you celebrate the birthday, as it -- is it done in this country, you sometimes have the idea that we shall -- shall celebrate a brat which is disrespectful to his parents, has never learned to
obey orders, and -- I don't celebrate such a beast. Man is not nice by himself. And I told you, you can only celebrate the -- a human being on his birthday as -- for his contribution, which he's going to make to the restoration of humanity at large. A holiday is not for yourself. If you celebrate your birthday because you are such a fine fellow yourself, out you go. If the others are good enough to find that you have made a contribution to their society, they'll tell you. And then they'll sing "He's a Jolly Good Fellow." And then you will be very happy. But you need the reaffirmation by the others. You cannot celebrate. And you cannot invite them to celebrate your birthday. They must surprise you. They must think of your birthday. You can't write them like this Prelate {Fischer} and say, "Please sing in my honor," you see. "Three cheers for the great Prelate {Fischer}."
But gentlemen, I think the revolution, which I wanted to bring about in your thinking, is really that the acquired faculties of mankind are in us as far as we have the calendar through which we are trained and educated. Of course, to a certain extent you are all at this moment educated into the college calendar. You have four months of vacation and eight months of wasting time. And so there are four useful months, and eight useless.
Now gentlemen, if you would understand the college calendar, you would make one great discovery: that the vacations are important. In this country, you are in great danger of neglecting them, as you know. And in Chicago and New York, people say, "Oh, these people at Dartmouth, they just waste their time. They must be very rich. We work three terms a year." Are there three or four terms -- in Chicago?
Wie?
(Three. Three.)
Three. They have a factory. And they mistake education and the growth of a human being with the production of -- of knowledge, or whatever they call it. I don't know. Taking examinations. And you are in great temptation, gentlemen, to over-pra- -- -appraise your -- your little items which you cover in one year, and not to appraise the rhythm of vacation and work. After eight months, it is high time for you to forget marks and examinations and to let the things that cannot be tested in an examination settle in you. As you may see, when you look at your seniors, the people after commencement, there is a development in every human being in the four years in college. Very unexpectedly, some people who have no good marks have the real benefit of their education, because they have still this vegetative power to digest, to drop, to select, to filter, without -- it goes on without their knowing much about it. But just the freshmen and senior, they look differently, as you all know. You notice it. And if they have used this
rhythm well, trusted it, it has produced results, which are far beyond their own plans.
Will you take down then until -- at the end of today this postulate, gentlemen, that through the cyclical living of the calendar, man learns to distinguish between his aims and his destiny. You aim at taking this course, gentlemen. That's your will. But the destiny which unfolds during your going four years to college is -- goes far beyond your purpose. Don't believe, gentlemen, that a man ever attains what he purposively wants. If he wants it too badly, he will usually attain the opposite.
Your growth is something that's not of your making. And the cycle of the calendar reminds you then of this, what the last century has totally lost under its factory system, its sched- -- system of schedules, its system of timetables, that the better things of life, gentlemen, come to us, and only the unimportant things of life can be willed by us. The woman which you -- are going to marry, gentlemen, that you happen to meet her, that's always a miracle. You can never will that. Later, you can will to propose to her. But that's inside the great accident that she -- you ever ran across her. How can ma- -- how can you explain that? So all this nice way of -- in psychology how to make friends, gentlemen, Mr. Dale Carnegie cannot help you in the selection of the people whom you happen to know. That's your destiny in whom you -- whom you happen to be able to contact and so -- that he might become your friend. You can't meet 2 billion people on the globe and then make your selection?
And people do -- all -- always overlook, gentlemen, that by the calendar for the past, and by your expectation and your faith and your courage, or boldness, and your jumping powers in the future, we -- you meet destiny, instead of aim. Now you are so lowered to the animal nature of -- inside yourself, that you really believe the past has been brought on by purpose, by man's will. And that the future must be brought on by purpose, by plan. Then why do we plan -- why does the Russian Plan plague us? We feel that to plan the future is impossible. That's not the whole story, gentlemen. The plan is in the sight of your eyes. Your destiny goes on over your heads. That you suddenly in 1941, if you had been that age -- been drafted and gone -- gone -- marched off into the war, gentlemen, that's destiny. That this country went to war twice, the -- 1917 and 1941, that was against the will of everybody, including the president. Including the president. Nobody in this country has willed this war. But they had to go. And you cannot understand, gentlemen, that a destiny has to be accepted against our will. A decent fellow marries only when it is inevitable. Not because he wills it. Because that's a test that he must marry, that she's the right person. If he says to the last minute, "No," then he is probably to be very happy in his marriage. And all the people who get a woman who -- without her love and finally persuade her to do
it, they are the unhappiest creatures in the world.
There is in the cal- -- let me close with this, gentlemen, just to make you -- sure that you understand. The calendar is a way for joining the past with the right feeling of what has happened to us, that we have been led into something big by the acquisition of new faculties by the divinity of man, but we haven't done it ourselves. We suddenly find ourselves in this new medium. The 4th of July is not the doing of any one person, as you well know, but we can be grateful for -- that it happened. We share then, you see, in an event which is bigger than anything any man intended rationally to do.
And the -- on the Moselle River, in Germany, there is a beautiful castle, Cochem. And a -- a banker -- very rich banker from Berlin renovated the castle and took it over. And he had a beautiful wife, very beautiful girl she was. And she eloped with his clerk. And so he put on the portals of his castle a verse. Of course, I can't translate it into English verse. I try -- shall try to translate it in -- as best as I can at this moment: "Never us -- will fortune too great or woman too beautiful. God in His -- Its ire, in His wrath might concede you this gift."
The gifts, gentlemen, which we owe to the calendar, are not of this type, of having been willed, having been wanted, just as we want a horse, or a car, or something we buy. The -- life's {qualities}, gentlemen, cannot be bought. The 4th of July, as I told you, were for the signers of the Declaration of Independence an ominous day. And there was a deadly silence in the whole of -- Continental Congress when the word "a new nation" fell. Everybody trembled. Nobody was happy. But you are.