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

...we are more or less definitely established. But I don't have the final list. We have a new, very refined, and very {b-i-m} system of -- of punching, et cetera. Everything the brain can -- can replace thinking is done for us. So I can only do a preliminary work. And I want to assign today the reports. Mr. Lauber. Is he here? Lauber?

(He dropped the course.)

I hadn't been told.

Baumann? He dropped the course? No, you are here. {Hechin}? {Hechin}? Frankel? Those four -- three of you, will you kindly report on today's meeting, tomorrow? I'm sorry I have to make it so brief, but you -- we are here under martial law, because as -- you know, it's really -- all be over by May 1st. You -- you must make an extraordinary effort.

Then Mr. Sandberg--is he here?--Vanraalte, Rice, and Albright. Here? You will report on tomorrow's meeting, on February 21st. Amlicke, here? { }. Blake. Bradley -- two Bradleys? What?

(Well, there are two of us. You want us to -- both report the same?)

Sure. Chomentowski and Cooper. Where is he? You will report on February 26th for the lec- -- class, of course, of February 21st. Davis, Dodds, Dodge, {English}, and Erving: kindly report on February 28th. And {Everts}, Finerty, {Frechees} and Freeman will kindly report on March 4th, about the lecture of -- the meeting of February 28th.

[tape interruption]

...the establishment of the method by which we will try to master this incredibly long and varied story of the human race in such a short time, in such a compressed way. You remember that our important innovation was: that whereas you hear a nature opposed to society--very often here in the social sciences, and the natural division of the natural sciences--and then you have somewhere these floating humanities--and nobody quite knows where they belong; you have these three divisions here, have you not?--we made a very simple, but very aggressive arrangement. We said that the acquired faculties, gentlemen, of mankind cannot be separated in opposition to nature, into the humanities here, and the social sciences there. I think that's one of the most

devastating accusations against modern liberal arts colleges, that they agree to this division: that Mr. Kierkegaard or Mr. Jesus Christ is in the humanities, and that the Constitution of the United States is in the social sciences! Then we forget who created the Constitution of the United States. These were people, were they not? Human beings. And these completely interrupt the course of events from nature through people into institutions.

Now I have tried to il- -- to ask you to change your point of view and to understand that man is somebody who is thrown out of nature. We are all unnatural beings. We yearn for the solution of our {problems}. And this we called the period of our prehistory, in which you at this moment live in your own personal life. You have lost your first or second nature--whatever you call it--of your family life. You are waking up to your responsibility, but Heaven! You don't know what it is. You are waiting, you are yearning, you are longing, you are learning, you are groping. Whatev- -- -ever it is, it is before your incarnation. Before your -- you are at this moment tadpoles. But don't be ashamed of it. It is your honor that you are a larva of your final existence. You aren't yet whom you want to be.

Then we said there is an event. You will decide that you will have to become a doctor. In this moment, you become serious. You begin to take place, as we can say. And we call this the eventful story of the decisive moment, and of the decisive person. And then we said, this "once in every -- for every man and nation comes the hour to decide" then wants to go on forever. All real life is an attempt, from marriage on, you see, to -- to any professional choice, that's the once-forever. Take any tennis player. He has -- ends up as a professional, perhaps. Once he started just to play. And it got him, you see, and he stayed with it.

Life is -- is a very wonderful thing, gentlemen. Nothing can take place, if there has been no promise, and no expectation, and no longing. But when it takes place, it is worthwhile, it wants to stay.

And so this would be the story of our habits, of our institutions. I wrote a very wonderful article in an ins- -- Italian Encyclopedia. And the Italians are very wise men. And completely immune against the trash of modern psychology. And there a man wrote an article on habit, in this big encyclopedia of the Italians. A very wonderful work. And he said, "Habit," something very startling, "is the emphasis we place on something we have done once, successfully," you see. It is the emphasis placed, whereas here people say, "Habit is just repetition," you see. But the { } is that once you have done something, you are proud of it. And the habit is then the emphasis we put on something, you see. Once a Christian, always a Christian, because you cannot go back on -- with the best thing you have ever done.

So habit is even nothing as you think, just routine. If usually -- if I hear of people -- first people here spoke -- speak about habit, you despise it. Habit is routine. That's getting into the rut -- into a rut. That isn't so simple, gentlemen. Anything good you have done deserves to be repeated, you see. But we create the habit, as we create the event. And therefore, the institution or the habit then are just two words for the same thing--remind us that we have a history. We are not without ancestors. We are the heirs of all creation, as Herman Melville has called us in his great apostrophe of the Americans. We are the heirs of all creation. We can only, if there are habits.

So you have these four steps, gentlemen. And you see suddenly where the humanities belong. Take the arts; take music. That is the prehistory, the yearning of man. If you read -- sing a hymn, you are yearning, you see; you are trying -- longing for the coming of the Lord, or whatever it is. Three and four -- these are the four steps into which any real human education should be divided. Nature, the most indifferent. The -- your soul's urges and desires in a specially expressed prophecy in the arts, in song, in whatever, expresses emotional expectation. The event -- that's the real history of manmade events, and man-suffered events. And then the history of institutions. How do we keep going? Why is Dartmouth still here after the Earl of Dartmouth and Eleazar {Wheeler} have died? And the last Indian has fled, at the news of the missionary college? Ja, it is mysterious. Of course, you have become red Indians by now. So in a way, the -- this -- has been worked very beautifully. Instead of making Indians into Christians, you have made Christians into Indians.

Now from this I take the right today to show you that we cannot begin the story here. But we have to start where we are today with the institutions. And we have to ask ourselves in a first half of this course--it will not be as long as the second; it will be quite short; perhaps two weeks or three weeks--how do we acquire, in the form of habits and institutions, those achievements of speech, writing, the arts and sciences, and prophecy and fatherhood, which from antiquity are our heritage, our legitimate heritage? How do you at this moment still know that something has gone before which is important? Most of you of course are completely ignorant of this tradition. But I want to show you know now that it is impossible to preserve this tradition without certain institutions--which day in, day out bring this into your rhythm so that you can dispose of it.

So we can formulate it this way, gentlemen: the inheritance of acquired faculties is not possible without explicit action in every individual case. You can lose this tradition. You can lose this endowment. You can, as progressive education has very hard tried to do, lose a European tradition. Pragmatism is a revolt of America against Europe. It's an attempt to get footloose, to shake off the connection--the chain, you may say--or the burden put over by the classics, for

example, you see. So they began not to read Greek and Latin in the last 40 years. That's after all an event, is it not, an action? And it means that a certain amount of acquired faculties of the human race did not seem necessary for you as educated people of today. In 1900, a college graduate had to know the classical languages, you see. In 1957, he does not know a classical language. Question: what does he know?

And I hold--and that it's quite important for you to know--that the whole last 50 years are a purely negative movement which I fully approve of, just as Mr. {Kramer} yesterday approved of the shaking-off of power politics in missions. Who went to -- by the way to Dr. {Kramer's} lecture? You remember, that was his point. But gentlemen, you must know that this is a purely negative movement the -- for -- modern progressive educational movement. It is -- only says what not to burden you with, you see. Not to acquire certain faculties, which have vis-…-vis -- be acquired since Harvard College was founded in 1637, if you wanted to be an educated man in America. And I've told many a times to many of you, that since 1900, the greatest human specimen in the western hemisphere was an educated American. They were rare, but they were better than any European, because they had the whole heritage of France, Germany, England, and Italy at their fingertips. -- Such a man was, for example, George Ticknor, after whom we still have in this college the Ticknor Club.

You are not the best human specimen, gentlemen. And I don't say this to a rile you, but to remind you, gentlemen, that a great type in this country has been destroyed--and I think recklessly been destroyed--in the last 40 years. You cannot hold a candle to a man like William James. Or Woodrow Wilson. And not one of you will come up to their educational standards, you see. That's why a West Pointer today is president. A know-nothing man, who doesn't even read the newspapers, who has never met a spirit -- spirited man in his life, who never sees a -- an artist, or a scholar, or -- or a great mind of -- of anybody's. That's not his business.

There -- there is a lack of education today. That is, because your whole educational -- leaders have been concerned of freeing America from the mortgage of European qualities, and have said they are not -- don't deserve to be inherited. Now, I tell you: I'm still in favor of the decision, you see. And I think it was inevitable that a leading America -- United States had to get rid of a certain amount of unnecessary European ballast. But you haven't done yet anything to replace it. And it looks to me that you'll never replace it, that in this country, the college people will cease to be the leading class in government and economics. That people who are not educated will do better things than the so-called educated people.

You have still not solved this problem, because the important American qualities are not today developed in the colleges. They are developed in our sports; they are developed in -- in -- on our highways; they are developed, you see, in many other ways. And they are great qualities. But it is very doubtful that they are developed in the liberal arts college.

That's very serious, and it may show you that my question today is quite practical. It means: how do you acquire those habits by which the events of the past become part of your heritage? How is it transmitted, I mean? And I want to concentrate on one thing, because it is the most human way of conveying to you those qualities.

We said before, gentlemen: if you want to remember an earthquake, you can stare at the debris of the earthquake. If you went -- go into the woods here, you can still see the hurricane wood, the timber lying there. And of course people with whom you may go, of an older age, tell you that's the hurricane of 1938. Wie? And that's one way, so to speak, of natural events being remembered. But we -- I already told you before, that would not be the transmission of a faculty acquired. That's something external. And therefore, gentlemen, the mere hanging-on to the ruins of a building, for example, would not remember you of the Civil War, obviously, you see. It would only remember you, but it wouldn't get in under your skin. But if you ask yourself: how do you recognize that most Americans think they are Christians, you would all agree that the condition for being a Christian is that he knows the meaning of Easter. That's the minimum. If he doesn't know the meaning of Easter, he has no right to call himself a Christian.

Therefore, gentlemen, the way in which we remember the past in such a way that we allow this event to take place once more in our own life, is by mak- -- statu- -- sta- -- stating a holiday. The { } despised thing, gentlemen, is--which I think is central in the transmission of acquired faculties--is the calendar in which days are set aside to enter upon the spirit of an acquired faculty in the way in which it was acquired. If you celebrate Easter right, the event is taking place once more. And in a way, you will -- may say that Christ died much more for you and me than He died for His contemporaries, who didn't get the benefit of the story at all. Therefore, it would absolutely foolish if you would say that Easter happened when He was crucified. Obviously, there is more Easter happening today than 2,000 years ago. That's saying very little, but it is the minimum which you have to say -- to understand His action. Because if He had looked at His own day and time, you see, we would have to come to the conclusion that there never was any Christianity, so to speak, because it was just ridiculous, you see, because nobody paid any attention to what happened in that corner of Palestine.

Now gentlemen, this has a tremendous consequence. If you look at the past in the form of repeating the decisive days in which modern life was instituted, began--if you say the calendar is the day of our beginnings--then history with regard to the future, and with regard to the past, looks absolutely different. Today you people who are only natural historians, and who have abolished history in your mind -- you see not the difference between cattle and men, between tragedy and creation, and between evolution and -- and indifference. To you, all history is bunk and history is just a straight line. That's what you think history looks like. You say, "Here's the past, and here's the present, and here's the future." Gentlemen, that is not -- it is nonsense, utter nonsense. That history that matters exists only as long as it is not a straight line. But as long as every event of importance in the past is put in such a form to you that at one time in your life you enter upon its spirit--that it is able to find you, and to pick you, and to form you --. And what I mean then by this circle, in which we see the path -- past, the cycle of events is an order which embraces your whole life. You -- and it doesn't even -- it doesn't mean that in one year you celebrate Easter, and in the next year, you celebrate it again. Take the Olympic Games; that is a fouryear cycle, because the nations of this world cannot meet every year. And yet the spirit of the Olympic Games give us something very important to impart to all nations today, you will admit, on the globe, you see. The Hungarians and the Russians after all did survive the Olympic Games, even this year, which is a remarkable thing. It -- nearly seemed impossible. And the pla- -- games did take place.

And therefore, the calendar of which I'm speaking at this moment has an indefinite range. It can be four years that something hits you; take your silver anniversary which you celebrate after 25 years, you see; or take your golden jubilee as a doctor, with a doctor's degree, which you celebrate every 50 years. In other words, gentlemen, anniversaries, as we may call them, are not limited to one-year cycle. But according to circumstances, they may vary from feier- -- celebrating a century, the turn of a century. You can celebrate the year 1900, as a beginning of a new century. It was done, you see, on a large scale. And all people remembered 1800, and 1700, and 1600. Especially here, where in 1600 there were -- was not yet an American colony, you see. So one does remember then even how it came to pass that the things have changed.

But the past, gentlemen, is only living, and deserves the name of an historical past, if there is still occasion for you and me to enter upon it, by setting aside in our life a limited time -- space of time by -- in which we enter upon this past. It is only natural, since we live a short li- -- life on this earth, that we can only give days of our life to this reconnection with the past. Don't belittle this. That -- you say, "Well, Easter is just one day." Gentlemen, that's quite a bit if you do it every year. It amounts -- if you become now, as everybody is -- usually

become -- 100 years old, you give 100 years to the reminiscing of Easter in your life, you see. And if you add Christmas, there's another 200 years. So it is no wonder that 200 days in your life allow you to become really part and parcel of the Christian tradition. And I'll give you one secret, gentlemen, that it is the only way -- the only way in which you can become such a part. I will not believe a man who says he doesn't have to celebrate, he ha- -- doesn't have to give time, and yet he's imbued with the spirit of this or that. I want to see the schedule of a man every day to know what he believes in. Otherwise I won't believe him, if he says what he is: an idealist, for example, you see, who -- who cannot prove to me that there is any room in his life for his ideals. That's why idealists are all wrong, because they have no time to show for their ideals. They say they look up to the stars, break their neck, and then they are idealists. Tell me how much a man gives to human service, you see, to charity, to commiseration, to sympathy, you see. I'll begin to -- accept his word for it that he is a good man. But if he says he is good, you see, thoroughly good, you see, because he writes once a letter with three dollars for the Alumni Fund of Dartmouth College, I won't believe it. It's too little. No time given to it, you see. The postage stamp is not convincing to me. It goes too fast.

The distribution, gentlemen, of our time, between -- in entering upon the spirit of the past, or creating the future, or living in the present decides over a man's value -- values, or about his faith, about his bel- --. Nothing else. Tell me for what you give time, and I tell you who you are -- who you are. And it goes exactly by the time spent. Not by the clock, of course, but if you give the little finger to an Easter celebration really, and feel you must go there, it has consequences. There are many acts that are not connected directly with Easter afterward, but they -- they take place because you have exposed yourself, you see, to this impact, to this entering upon this spirit of this day. Many things you wouldn't have done are then done, you see. And they are of course not directly and visibly connected with the celebration of Easter, but they spring from this source.

All idealism of which -- in which you indulge, gentlemen, tries to say -- think two things: that a man has a good character or a bad character, regardless of the time he spends on anything. I don't believe this. I think we are just as much in reality as all other living beings in this earth--and things too, you see. And our time is our religion. Our time is our investment. And we have no other property on this earth, gentlemen. The only property a man has is his time. I don't believe in war bonds, because we have an inflation. And I don't believe in stocks, because we have gambling on the stock exchange. But I do believe in time. And I do believe that the distribution of your time is the essential act of confession. There we are all caught.

Therefore, I regret that we use for this very sacred institution, gentlemen,

of the transmission of acquired faculties the very trite name of "calendar." I've written this pamphlet for your perusal called "Time-bettering Days." Now that's what the calendar is, you see. It's an attempt to better your average, your timeaverage, so to speak, you see, to make you score more within the limits of your short life. Time-bettering days are holidays, and I -- Shakespeare has called them "time-bettering days," because he was the first man who felt, obviously, that every -- all these great secrets should be expressed in a fresh manner. He didn't call them "holy days," you see. And there is no religious term in all Shakespeare, really. He is one of these so-called "politiciens" of his days, the people who said, "We will not talk religion, because that leads to civil war. We will, however, keep the secrets of this, you see, by expressing it in a new way." So he called the calendar of a human being who wants to be educated, "Time-bettering Days."

Now the time-bettering days of the past, gentlemen, are only alive if you celebrate them. And to celebrate a holiday, gentlemen, is the problem of an industrial civilization, more than ever, because we no longer all celebrate at the same time. If you take a railroad man or a ship worker, he works at night and he comes home in daytime. And this poor man today is very hard-put to have any celebration together with anybody else, you see. You know, they have now radio hours at night in order to satisfy the needs of these people.

So gentlemen, we enter today a very critical state of the transmission of acquired faculties, because we no longer can celebrate the holidays of the community all together. We have to -- to -- to--how would you call this?--to spread, to--how do you call this?--intersperse?--I don't know quite the right word--for the holidays, so that a man who works at night and sleeps at day still might get the benefit of such a holiday. And he cannot march in the parade on July 4th, because during July the 4th, he wants to sleep, you see. Still, you -- if you want to really deal with all -- every man's feelings and emotions with regard to the July 4th, or the Gettysburg Address, or the -- Lincoln's birthday, you will have to find ways and means today to penetrate the experience of every child born in America with the experience that the -- to -- February 22nd or Easter is a holiday. And this is a great problem today which we have, with the truck drivers who drive all night, you see, and sleep at day. I don't know how many truck drivers we have in America, but I suppose it is several hundred thousand, wouldn't you think?

We have new classes of men, gentlemen, which explain to you the fact that you are totally indifferent to the human calendar. We are callous. In the last 40 years, this great way of transmitting human qualities has suffered, because we no longer live the same rhythm of week and Sunday altogether. But every class of -- of people--nurses, and doctors, and truck drivers, and factory workers, et cetera, et cetera--have a different calendar. Not only by night and day, but also --

because of their vacation time. Some people take their vacation in February, and some people take their vacation in August. And so on and so forth. And gentlemen, the -- still the need is there that every man born from woman is introduced into the great tradition of the human race.

And again I -- you will now -- understand why there is tremendous -- a tremendous vacuum at this moment in America. In 1900, the calendar of the Church--with Easter, you see, and -- and Christmas--and the natural calendar of the seasons coincided with every man's life in the community still very much. And therefore, there -- we didn't have to give special consideration to this transmission of acquired faculties, by celebrating holidays. It was just done. Today, we have to wake up to the fact that -- without an explicit handling of this problem, you will not be able to educate your children into human beings. They'll be pigs--without memory, without respect, without any regard to the past, not because something -- they are worse people, but it is much harder today to get a family together to celebrate anything on the same day. They have a different schedule. Everyone has. You go to college, and somebody else in the family goes to work. Well, that already disrupts the -- unity and harmony of your celebrating your holiday. You can't -- don't have the same day free. When you have vacations, they haven't. And when they have vacations, you haven't.

Now the calendar gives to the past, gentlemen, a rhythmical character. If you educate a child in the tradition, for example, in your home, of the Christian Church, by allowing the child to think that Christmas consists in emptying the sh- -- the window -- the shop window of a big department store, the Christmas becomes -- it makes an indelible impression on this child. And it waits for the return of this day. And so you get the tremendously interesting fact that the past can be expected. It -- it becomes alive, because the child during the 365 days is expecting the return of its Christmas, the celebration of its birthday. And what originally is something that has gone on long ago, through the holiday again regains its character of being a promise -- a prophecy, of being forecast, and having to be fulfilled again.

And so we enter this whole cycle, you remember, from nature; to yearning, to the longing; to the fulfillment, to the institution, if this institution allows the child to wait for the event, and then go on again. And therefore, I think I'm right that I say that the calendar creates out a mere avenue of the past--which would be just a straight line, a meaningless highway into the past--a cy- -- cyclical movement in which these stages: nature, yearning, event, and institution, are following each other. Because the child, already after Epiphany, when the -- when the tree is taken down, is -- is allowed to know that this will return, that it is not gone forever. It is not just one celebration. The same with the Olympic Games in Melbourne. They carry in themselves the seed of all the people who

couldn't be champions this year, you see. Why did they go there? To prepare themselves. Eight years from now, they may be the real people. But they went already this time to get heated up.

So the calendar, gentlemen, is more than this one day. It is the whole avenue, the approach to this day when it will return. We had to work -- do some original work--"creative," you call it here, well -- just all work for our parents at Christmas. Every child was expected to do something with their hands, or with their -- with their pen. And I well -- very well remember that after the thing was done at Christmas, and we had satisfied the -- the demand, that very early already, in February, you might begin to think of the -- the -- what would you do next year. It was harder every year to find something.

And -- so that holidays, gentlemen, are not just days. They are time-bettering days, because they tower over meaningless time, like watch-towers. The day is exalted in the literal sense, that you can look at this day, before and after; and it seems to make a landmark in time. Holidays are a -- landmarks in time. They are not just one day. That wouldn't explain their tremendous effect on us, you see. That's why Easter is more than one day, because over 364 days in the year, we can appeal to Easter, because it is the one day in the year that can return. No day other -- no weekday can really return, because we never know what weather it -- going to be in New England. As you know, there are 227 weathers, and nobody does anything about it. But you can do something about Easter, because it has not 227 different characters, because it is one and the same day. But you can celebrate it each year better, with more understanding.

So what I want to do is to get you out of the terrible habit to say, "So what?" to holidays. "It's just -- any day as any other." That is not true, gentlemen. Any day like Washington's Birthday, or Labor Day--any holiday--more or less incompletely celebrated -- you, for ex- -- a student of course is a formless creature and hates holidays in a way. You think you can do without, because all life is a holiday at this moment for you, you don't understand how rare holidays are. But I assure you that the great thing about holidays is that they add to time a quality, which the other days of the year do not have. What is this quality of the single day of Christmas, gentlemen? That it spans the times. There is a tension. Christmas waits for the next Christmas. And it asks: will you do right between the two holidays? The same is true about the 4th of July. You may despise the pep talks at the 4th of July. Yet -- where would this country be without the 4th of July? It would have no memory, it would have no history, it would have no way of recognizing each other as American citizens. It's a very important day, gentlemen. Don't forget that. And why is it important? What does this strange word "important" mean?

Gentlemen, what's the difference between nature and history? The difference between nature is that in nature, nothing is more important than anything else, and nothing is important. It's all dead. If I treat you as nature, you are all ripe for the ashcan and for the undertaker. You are not important. Today in a natural science era, the -- one -- first thing a student will say -- is -- say, "I'm not important." He's not in history, gentlemen. In history -- history is the power to give importance to certain acts, and events, and dates. A holiday is a day endowed with something that nature does not give, that nature doesn't have. Nothing in nature is more important than anything else, because all in nature, under natural law isn't then needed. You cannot expel it into a -- a void, you see, any part of nature. All the particles are there. Energy is kept, as you know, and preserved. Volume is preserved. Matter is preserved. Space is preserved, you see.

So in nature, everything is indifferent, everything is dead, everything is cold, and everything is of equal indifference. And you all try to behave like nature when you say, "I don't care." "I'm indifferent." -- That doesn't mean this, because you have accepted the fact that you are under fate, and that you are just so many electrons. And how could this be interesting? How could this be important? It isn't important that you consist of so many electrons, you see. It's utterly unimportant. It makes you unimportant. But you celebrate Easter, and you become the sons of God, you become the brothers of the first-born. Gentlemen, nothing makes you more important -- it is a trem- -- a way of becoming important. That's a holiday. And therefore it is a landmark over the rest of your years. In 70 years, nothing important might happen. It's probably enough that you celebrate Easter once with a full heart to have a lifetime occupation. And you well know -- notice after you have gone under this {impulse}, for example, of the 4th of July, it makes you into a politician, or what-not, a statesman, that you have all your hands full, you see, to live up to this importance of this one event, which suddenly has struck you. If you read Mr. Truman, you feel that the events of the Civil War have struck home--when he was 14, 15 years old--and have made him. And that's why he has been a small man and an excellent president. And a man who knew what is important. And we have now a a government in -- in -- in Washington that does not know what's important. It tries to escape from importance. It wants to be just natural. It is -- has wiped out the -- the decisive discrimination between important things and unimportant things! You cannot read every weekend that the president plays golf before -- without feeling that the whole world is just a golf game.

Well, it's very serious, gentlemen. We live at this moment in a very terrible moment of American history, where it is -- the importance of America is wiped from the surface of the globe, from the map. We are unimportant, gentlemen, because we want it. Because material prosperity is against being important. Important people, gentlemen, are indifferent to -- to -- to wealth or poverty. It's

not -- not important. It is not important, material things. They are not important, but you don't believe this. You think they are important, and you are unimportant. You live by statistics. Statistics are -- treating unimportant things. That's the influence of the natural sciences. And it's the abolition of holidays in the last 40 years, and of the classics, which are a way of holidays in literature. "High points," as we call them. I haven't said "high points." I could have called of course holidays "high points."

And I want to bring you -- to your attention that by the nature of our existence, nothing is important, nothing is high, nothing is sublime. It is the pure act, gentlemen, of the transmission of acquired faculties--an act of faith--that you admit that the founder of our era is sublime. You can deny it. As an animal, you will deny it. As Mr. {Kramer} said today in chapel, you see, the charm- -- the devils know that Christ is the son of the Lord, and they tremble. They know it, but they won't do anything about it. They will not accept this landmark.

-- Everybody knows the truth, gentlemen, about the exalted events in -- in the history of the human race. You know as well as I--I don't have to tell you this--but you prefer to be devils, and to tremble, that is, to escape from it. And not -- not hear about it. But everybody knows in his heart that he is not a human being because he consists of so many genes, and hormones, and glands. That doesn't give you the right to exist. That doesn't protect you against concentration camps. That doesn't protect you against being gassed because you belong to the wrong race. How do you know what makes you deserve the civil rights program? Huh? Why aren't you just murdered around the corner in Mississippi, like this boy? What protects you? What makes you feel so safe, gentlemen? If the Russians come -- over here, they will not respect your li- -- right to -- to be alive, or to have property, or anything. Because they think you are just out -- worn-out statistical animals, gone-by people. Because you haven't acquired the faculty of a full human being by anything. You're just nice playboys. That's -- can be wiped out like that. That's not the -- by this, by being a playboy, gentlemen, you have no right to exist. That is, in the eyes of somebody else. You may of course feel that you are very nice, and deserve to exist. But how do you impress a Japanese, as a man from Siam, a man from Australia, a man from Russia, that when he meets you in the desert, he gives you a -- to -- food to -- to eat, and water to drink, bounds -- binds up your wounds, and cares for you? Can you explain this?

Only by a holiday, gentlemen, in which he has been brought up short to the real quality of his existence, and has not lived day by day like an animal. There is no other way of inculcating into him this fact that you deserve, you see, the brother- -- the brotherly treatment, because one man was beginning this great story that we all are brothers.

So a holiday, gentlemen, is nothing you can simply eliminate without eliminating our place in history. Holidays are the way in which history is transmitted. And now, see please that it is transmitted in such a way that it is valid for all the people who celebrate the holiday. Easter has this great quality that after you have celebrated Easter, anybody who celebrates Easter, you see, can be understood by you. It is not a private celebration for your private salvation, you see. But it is an opening-up, an explosion by which this hard casing around your individual--this rugged individualism--is broken up by the fact that you cannot deny that others have the same spirit. Therefore a holiday is celebrated by all, if possible, you see, or by many -- or by as many as possible, you see, because the holiday does not -- give you a spirit, but it communicates, it imparts one spirit to all.

Therefore history, gentlemen, becomes institutionalized through holidays, so that one event, and one act of one man, like the emancipation of the slaves by -- or the Second Inaugural of Lincoln, you see, that such an act may be shared by everyone who comes later, and that you can speak to him on the basis of this experience, and therefore you have a common basis for being the Supreme Court, for human rights; or when you have a claim -- a basis, you see, for concluding peace. You can tell the Russians that after all they abolished slavery the same year as Abraham Lincoln abolished it. And that I -- still think is a good topic for -- between the Bolsheviks and us, that in Russia and this country, serfdom disappeared at the same time. Because it means that we can celebrate the same event as a landmark of humanity. And then before we do this, gentlemen, we cannot feel safe against the Russians. You have to establish a common memory with these people, you see, for their great actions of self-denial.

So gentlemen -- at this moment, I'm -- cannot go on. So I only want to sum it all up, gentlemen. Through the celebration of holidays, the past takes on the shape of a cycle. And this cycle involves as much our future expectations as our connection with the past, because it projects part of the past into our own future, and awaits from us -- or we wait for seeing these old holidays fulfilled in our own lives. And therefore the past is different from the future. The future is a point, or a straight line, or something which has no shape. The past is not shapeless. The past is shaped as an educational experience by the holidays which reach you. And the acceptance or the rejection of holidays therefore is the greatest im-- -- of the greatest importance for the education of the human race. Tell me what's -- you celebrate--I told you, what the calendar is--and I'll tell you what you are, you see. If you have no holidays, I'll say that you are statistically important, that you are just dust, that you are nature, that you are gravel, pebble, or whatever you prefer. Because a -- a man who has no holidays is a man without history. Most of you at least celebrate your -- their own -- your own birthday, or your mother's birthday, don't you?

So in this -- way, every one of you has some holiday, I suppose, in a small way he -- he gives -- pays his attention to. Well on this, more next time.

Let's break up here.