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

So before saying anything, the -- the two topics will be the plurality of the calendars--the cycles--which tried to educate, or to discipline us from the past. And the other thing is: which degree of discipline a holi- -- must a holiday or the calendar really have in order to reach you and me? That's the worst problem. Perhaps I shall take up this even first. But before, let me remind you that we have to do some work on this subject, with the help of the papers I have distributed among them. The "Time-bettering Days," and the book which I asked you to read, The Wes- -- Driving Power of Western Civilization, deal with holidays. There is -- "Time-bettering Days," many holidays are involved, especially Easter, at the end. The -- book gives a story of the introduction of a holiday which is only known to the Cath- -- the Roman Cath-...

[tape interruption]

...which has played a great part in the history of the last thousand years all over the western world: the 2nd of November, celebrating the memory not of the saints, but of everyone--you and me--of the sinners in -- of the human race. It's a very strange celebration, because it opposes the celebration of the saints to the celebration of the common man. And since this allegedly is the era of the common man, this is the first celebration of the common man in our history. And that's why I want you to write a paper, till the Easter vacation, on this topic: your own experiences of holidays, in the light of these two papers: the -- the chapter on the -- All Souls in the Wes- -- Driving Power, and the "Time-bettering Days" paper. I want you to at least analyze two--you must have many experiences of holidays--analyze two of them of -- in your own life. I have found if -- I -- put you on to a holiday of your own choosing, as I did in former years, you would just go to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, misunderstand it, and then copy it wrongly. So the only way in which I can make you perhaps see the -- the importance of this whole problem today, is perhaps to ask you to make use of your own experience, in your family, or in your college, or in your summer vacations.

I include into the holidays obviously your vacations. It doesn't matter to me whether your holiday is one day, or two days, or five days, or three months. That's up to your own choosing, what you call a holiday. Probably in your experience the only holidays you have ever had are the summer vacations. If you call this "holiday" or "vacation," it makes no difference to me. You will see in the light of this -- papers what the importance is, that it is a landmark in your life, that you look to this time before it is lived, and that you look back on it after it is lived, you see, as something different from the run-of-the-mill days. That there have been time-bettering, or perhaps you say time-deteriorating days. But that they

constitute a gradation, a difference in time.

So this will be the theme. And you'd better get going right away. We have -- vacations break out on March 28th, and I wish to have your papers by that time. And as I said, once more: based on my dealing with the problem of the holiday in these two texts, and of course here in class, and the analysis of at least two of your own experiences--you can be critical of your experience, you can be critical of my text--that's the same to me.

It is very difficult at this moment, gentlemen, to even understand what a hol- -- why a holiday should be important. You think it's a day off. And the word "off" of course means that it's of no significance. A day off is a day in which you have to do nothing, in which you can stay at home, in which you can lie in bed, in which you -- don't have to work.

And this morning my little granddaughter excused herself--she has a terrible cold, and they have a school vacation--and she had to excuse herself. She said, "I'm delighted that I have my cold now, because, you know, I really like to go to school next week, again."

And then she blushed and said, "Well, in a way I like it," because of course it isn't done that any child can -- is allowed to say she likes school better than staying at home. And so you have always to be very cheerful if one of my classes is called off, instead of going -- black mourning over that fact.

So really, you only know that a holiday is a negation of something. It's a pure minus. It's a gap. It's a hiatus. Bec- -- the reason for this is, gentlemen, that the Greeks, the Greek spirit, the Gre- -- spirit of the arts and sciences only knows of leisure. The character, gentlemen, of a Greek holiday, or a Roman holiday, is negation of something, is leisure. Leisure is the absence of something. Leisure is less life than otherwise. It's -- today in this country, holidays are always completely confused with leisure. And "Give me free time." They say, "Give me more." You have now a 32-hour week, and we will end up in a two-hour week; and -- then people will know what to do with their leisure. And you can see to- -- there today, there is a terrible confusion. When the Greek spirit, gentlemen, of the mind, and of the Muses, and of the arts, and of the entertainment industry, and of the burlesque show, and the movies, and television prevails, then everything you know of holiday is only entertainment. And what is entertainment? To get between real times, and fill the -- out the gap. "Enter-" is like "inter-." And what is international? What's between the nations. What is entertainment? What keeps you, you see, busy between times.

And therefore, if you treat today the holiday as leisure, as entertainment,

as a -- a time for your hobbies, you miss the point totally. And I'm afraid that this is so, today; that instead of having holidays, the people who govern us, or who want to be elected, give people more and more leisure. That's meant by the famous term, of course, in ancient Rome, that you give them more bread and games, and that's how they are ruled, you see. And by and large, the American people are ruled in this way: by baseball and orange juice. "Keep the people happy," keep them happy. And therefore, gentlemen, we -- if the Greek spirit rules, there are no holidays.

Now I venture to say, gentlemen, that since 1945, in this country there has been an awareness that if you break all the classical values of Greek and Latin civilization, if you don't have a Latin -- school anymore, if you have no language requirements--as you practically have none, because that's just a fiction, your language requirement -- because it means the opposite from former days. It's -- you learn a language in order to forget it. That's the whole top- -- purpose of -- of the two years of the language studies which you undergo. It's silly; fiction. So if you have this, gentlemen, you live -- you try to gain leisure. We shorten working hours, and we sell you all kinds of entertainment. And even the Great Books are just entertainment. And everybody asks even of such a serious course as this, "What do I get out of it?" Gentlemen, whenever a man asks, "What do I get out of college?" he's a Greek mind who wants to be entertained. Now you don't get anything out of this course. But the world at large may at least exclude the fact that you might be otherwise a very harmful individual. I may make you less harmful.

Or as -- one of you came after the last class, and said to me--I was to -- give him an immediate solution of this holiday problem. And I -- I -- my only answer can be, gentlemen, "You have to undergo three months now of hard training before you can be useful instruments in helping us to find the solution." If you think that I have the solution without your getting terribly up-wrought about it, you are quite wrong. It takes many people, gentlemen, before you can reform the world. And you have to enter upon the spirit of the enterprise. And this -- where is the man? Who asked me? You remember?

You see, he -- he thinks I know the solution without him. Of course, I don't. As -- as long as you aren't {dickering} about too much -- leisure and too little holidays, nothing can be done. So it takes you three months before you understand that you need it, in this reform of the -- this leisure generation, which will perish from leisure and boredom. You are all bored, gentlemen, because you have too much leisure.

So the first thing I would like to throw out as a suggestion is that obviously a holiday is not to be identified with leisure. That's why I prefer your vacation

time as a holiday today. It's a more serious holiday, gentlemen, than the leisure you have in the week by -- by here sleeping through class. It's very serious to find, after a complete collapse of the holiday tradition, why holidays ha- -- may have some potency, and why, for example, Navajo Indians are able to remain Navajo Indians just because they have {salt} dances, and holidays. And that as -- soon as you abolish the holiday of the tribe with the dances, there is no tribe.

Gentlemen, the existence of any people, in the sense of people, depends on the celebration of holidays together. We can say, gentlemen, that there are as many people as there are holidays celebrated of a different nature. If you had all over the world as the only holidays, only Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, you would have the Christian people all over the earth, you see. But since we also have 4th of July, and Thanksgiving, we still have an American people.

So gentlemen, peoples are made by holidays. And they disappear without holidays. Then they become a mob. Why is that so? Because gentlemen, the holiday is something quite different from what you think in astronomy. For you, a day is 24 hours. And so I first say to you what -- is meant by "holiday" has absolutely nothing to do with the physical length of 24 hours. It may be 48 hours, it may be three months, you see; it may be whole -- a whole sabbatical year for a professor, who goes every seven years, you see, on his sabbatical year. And it may be a Roman holiday, as the -- the American nation took after the World War to celebrate for nine years its going to sleep again, and then have a breakdown and-- of communication in '29. That was such a mistaken holiday, you see. It was a holiday, however, from reality. Only in a strange sense.

The length of the holiday, gentlemen, cannot be measured by the yardstick of astronomical time. That's the first law. The second is, gentlemen, that during a holiday, we must pass through opposite experiences of our heart. If you have not the eve of Christmas--as unfortunately you don't have in this country--in the puritanical tradition, you see, of this country, Christmas is not celebrated as an evening of gifts, and as a morning of worship. But it's all telescoped, because for 200 years, Christmas was not celebrated in the United States. The Puritans were against it. And when it was imported, it was totally misunderstood. And that's why you have it now commercialized. And it is all packed together, because the importance of any holiday is that there are more than one moral status during the day. You have Good Friday, mourning. And you have rejoicing on -- on Easter Sunday. And in the middle, you have baptism, and ritual, and ten- -- suspension. If you do not celebrate Good Friday, you cannot celebrate Sun- -- Sunday.

Now it is very difficult for you to understand this, because the Puritans abolished here in this country the holidays, and only left the Sunday, the Sab-

bath of the Lord; 52 Sundays, one like the other. And no holidays. And everything we have, in the form of Easter and Christmas here, is later import by the Germans who came to this country, or the Swedes, or the Danes, you see. It is -- imposed. And it is -- has never -- gained the power of forcing people to give Christmas, and Easter, and Pentecost their -- its full range of developing opposite sentiments in one stretch. Rejoicing and mourning are of course the most natural opposites of feeling, you see: laughter and tears. Now a holiday must be a day in which both feelings come to their right.

For example, in a -- take a very small way of celebrating a little holiday like Sunday in a -- in a non-puritanical country, be it Germany--as a Lutheran country--or Sweden, or -- be it Italy. The relation on -- on a small Sunday in the morning, between laughter and tears, is very simple, that -- that the people go to church solemnly and seriously, and then go to the inn, cheerfully, and joyfully, and gaily and have their drink there together.

A friend of ours was fired as a minister in the South because he was a Lutheranist- -- a Lutheran denomination, and became a minister in a Methodist Church. And he used to sit with his parishioners after the service, you see, and indulge in a cup -- in a glass of beer. That was part of his celebrating the Sunday; that he, after being serious, he also was cheerful. So they fired him, because a minister cannot indulge in beer-drinking. They didn't know that the ups and downs of the human soul are the story, you see, of humanity, and not the flat- -- flatness, and platitudes of one hypocritical solemnity. They want to make these ministers into solemn asses, who always have to look sour, or always have to grin. It is both equally terrible, you see. "Keep smiling" is just as godless an attitude, gentlemen, as "Keep weeping." The human problem is to weep and to smile, one and the other.

And therefore a holiday is in -- a way of extracting from us our potentialities. And of course our potentialities are always of an opposite nature. And whether you say rejoicing and mourning, or wheth- -- whether you say, "aggression and -- and -- and peace," you see: "war and peace," for the greatness of life, you have to opposites, because man -- God wanted us to live through winter and summer, through spring and fall, through tears and joy.

And so any holiday must include two climaxes: Heaven and hell, black and white, joy and sorrow. If it doesn't, it isn't a holiday, because it doesn't mean the whole day -- man. And a holiday is a man in which we become whole, and not hollow. Therefore, all holidays in the United States are hollow, because they all are monistic, on one tone. At least that's what they try to -- to tell you. It isn't true, of course, of any serious man. But you poor people are misguided, because if you see the march of Macy's employees through the streets in -- at Christmas in

New York, it seems all to be just gay, you see. And the sentence that there was no room at the inn for the child that was born in the manger is forgotten, the very sorrowful aspect of the birth of Christ. It was not a joyful story, but it was a joyful story despite the tears that were shed on that day. That's the whole story.

So this is the second thing. The first thing was that the -- the -- leisure is not a holiday. The second thing is that any holiday, gentlemen, must be a composition of opposites. The third, I'll repeat this: the length of a holiday must be measured not in terms of astronomical time. Any normal holiday will overflow 24 hours, gentlemen, will be totally indifferent to the striking of the clock. And that's why the eve of a holiday usually belongs to it. And the Puritans, gentlemen--who were very religious people, and only had some reason to abolish the superstitions that preceded them--helped themselves by celebrating the afternoon of the Saturday. They would sit down at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. And the street in Norwich is still called Christian Street for this reason, that when a peddler came along, he found the people on the Saturday afternoon in every house he visited, reading the Bible, meditative, you see, in a relaxed, intellectual study group, so to speak. Now -- so that's how the puritan- -- Puritans went through the different moods of celebrating the Sabbath of the Lord. On the Saturday afternoon, they made an intellectual effort; and on the Sunday morning, they had an emotional effort.

And in this sense, I would say that the heart of the -- any holiday was observed by the Puritans, and that's why puritanism is a great power of forming character in this country, because they had the opposite attitudes. The intellectual study is something quite different from emotional enthusiasm. And if you go through two opposites, you can have a holiday. And the Sabbath -- the afternoon of the Saturday therefore is a revelation to anyone who studies Americanism, because he sees that even there, where these people fought, you see, the long celebrations of the Romans, you see, with -- and of the King James Court--with their drunkenness, and their revelry, and their theater plays, you see--they at least gave way to certain range, you see, because sitting in your family at home, with your Bible, and interpreting it is certainly something quite different from singing hymns in Sunday with a larger congregation, where you meet in a festive mood, because you come from three and four miles, you see, in your -- in your horse and buggy over land, and meet; and come out of the -- the solitude of your single farm.

So you understand. I'm -- I'm here at this moment rectifying the impression I might have given that I think the Puritans were only of a negative -- impact on this country. Quite the contrary. The one formative power that has made America a great country are the Puritans. And they had a very peculiar way of celebrating the holiday of the Lord by taking the Sabba- -- Sabbath very

seriously and beginning it in due time. And there was no work done on Saturday afternoon. Long before there were any laws against keeping the stores open. Now we keep the stores open till Saturday evening at 11 o'clock, which means that, of course, they -- the Sunday cannot be celebrated, because people cannot prepare themselves ins- -- inwardly for it. You cannot celebrate a Sunday, gentlemen, if you run into the evening of the Saturday, you see, heedlessly, without any expectation what's going to be tomorrow. And then just scratch your head in the morning and say, "Oh my, it- -- it's Sunday. I have to go to church."

The fourth element, gen- -- gentlemen, of the holiday is the sum of the three preceding things. The opposites of feeling, the opposites of human behavior, of human impressions, of mourning and rejoicing--this circulation of our whole character through various phases make the holiday into the image of much l„nger -- longer periods of life. In my "Time-bettering Days," I have quoted there the fact that the oldest holiday of which we know is the -- the Babylonian holiday -- imitates the course of the whole year. In 24 hours, the people run through all the seasons, and through all the 12 months, and through all the attitudes that a man takes while he lives in one year. So ge- -- what you have lost--and we all have lost--is the power to recognize--which you all learn in biology--is simply true: that a cell is built in the image of the whole body. And that a day, therefore, is built in the image of all time. And that a day is not 24 hours, gentlemen, and then added another 24 hours for the next day. But a holiday is a day which is taken so seriously that during this one day, you march through the -- whole of time, through eternity. This, if you cannot get this, you will not be able to write your paper. And you will not understand why it is at all important to think of holidays. You cannot at this moment -- I think most of you will abhor the idea that 24 hours could have a significance in which the whole of your life may be expressed, or symbolized, or lived.

Let me give you a number of examples to ascertain that you understand what I mean. The first example are the Olympic Games. To you, it is accidental that they are celebrated all four years, you see. It helps us, however, to see that you can have a holiday which is not every year, you see. The cycle of the Olympics is four years. We do this because the Greeks did it. The Greeks met in Olympia in 776 B.C. for the first time. They met from Italy, from Asia Minor, from the Greek Islands, and from the Greek mainland. And so it was very difficult. They had to leave home of course very early in the year. It took them threequarters of a year to come, and to go, and to meet. So it is practically, nearly, you see, one year -- of -- one-quarter of time -- of the period was taken up for the celebration of the Olympic Games. But what are -- is the four-year period meant to be for the Greeks?

As you know, there is a circus in every -- in every arena. And the Greeks

had their chariots driven around. And the charioteer was the greatest victor in the Olympic Games. And when Pindar sings his odes in favor of the games, the Olympic Games, it is for the victor in the horse -- in the char- -- race -- chariot race, that he sings his great and famous Olympic hymns. That was very expensive. The tyrant of -- of Syracuse might win, you see, or some big shot. The red -- Rockefeller of his days, the tremendous robber baron. And Mr. Pindar would, for enough gold mines, would sing and eternalize his fame, and ennoble him. And say that now, through this victory in the circus, he had become deified or sanctified, which is a -- just another word for becoming the name-giving hero of the holiday. Because "sanctification" and "holification" is of course the same thing. "Holy," "sanctus" just means perfect, accomplished, {sane}, and { }. Don't think that saints are something very unusual, you see. You all want to be saints, you see. You all want to be {sane}.

What is a circus, and why is a chariot race the center of the Olympic Games in antiquity, gentlemen? Because the circus depicts the race of the sun on -- in the sky. And the Greeks, as pagans, had a religion which worshiped the -- the movement of the stars in the sky. And the biggest star is the sun. And that's why to -- to this day, horse-racing is done in this elliptic form, because -- the race of the round, and round, and round, and round again, every round being one day. But more -- there's more to it. The Greeks worshiped in these four years, gentlemen, practically four times 365 years.

The -- the so-called Great Year in antiquity treated every year as one day of a {greater} year. And after 1460 years, as you can easily find out by thinking of leap years -- since ev- -- one-quarter of a year is always, you see, lacking in our calendar, if you only take 365 years, since we had one-quarter of a year more. After 1460 years, the sun, and the moon, and the stars are in exactly the same position as 1460 years before. Because it takes four times a quarter-day to make one day, times 365, you see, to bring the whole thing to a final cycle. It was the discovery of the ancients, gentlemen, that the so-called Great Year of 1460 years allowed men to see...

[tape interruption]

...years now. They didn't in antiquity...

[tape interruption]

...1460 years, then I think my thesis is justified.

The last great poem by the poet Goethe--give you quite another example--is called "The Bridegroom." It was -- it was written when the man was

80. And perhaps in Vermont, but not otherwise, people at 80 are -- octogenarians usually are not bridegrooms. But the human soul, if at all alive, is always a bride. That's the essence of -- of religion, that the human soul is the daughter, is -- has the qualities of a bride. If you haven't this quality, you are not alive anymore. Your soul has died. The human soul is a bride. And so Goethe, feeling very deeply about this, describes one day of his life: morning, noon, evening, and midnight. And there are four verses to the poem--or five; I've forgotten at this moment--in which every verse takes up -- stanza -- the human constellation. In the morning of your life, you see, at noon, and evening, and when it is over. And so he uses in this very concentrated poem--which is considered one of his greatest--the day as expressing a whole life, the whole of human life.

You have another example here only of the fact that a day can be treated very differently from the way you treat a day, you see. It can embody the whole of time. And it must, if it is to be a holiday.

The third example is taken--any Roman Catholic will know a little bit about thi- -- anybody who has been on a retreat may know something about this--is of course the day of the -- the hours of the day in a monastery, the socalled canonical hours. The seven canonical hours, which also are, as you know, explained to you in "Time-bettering Days"--these seven canonical hours, which begin early in the morning and end then after midnight -- in the evening with the compline, again try to press into these experiences, the human experiences of these seven occasions during one day, first of all the whole -- experience of a whole week, seven, the week has seven; and then the whole life of creation. And that's why the Church always said that the history of the world consists of seven ages, so that the seven hours in one day could, so to speak, take man through the whole experience from the creation of man to the end of time.

And so we have -- on the other end of this strange, representative thinking, we have the fact that to this day, in an old-fashioned Catholic Church, the cathedral building is built in such a way that you are taken through the seven ages of the world when you enter the church on Sunday. Of course, you don't know this, because you go there on an Easter parade to be photographed in Life. But if you forget about photographs and Life, and if you consider that to go to church means to enter death--that's the meaning of going to church: to volunteer to die, so that you may rise again--then it is only natural that you must enter a church in order to say farewell to your very accidental moment of life at this moment, and be willing to be -- to be -- hollowed, or to be emptied of your accidental existence in the year 1957, which is not good enough for a human soul, and to be taken through th- -- all the ages of men. And the architecture of the medieval cathedral is such that you begin in paradise--that's in front of the church before you go up the stairs. And the little place in front of the church is

then the era of nature, which I told you, that precedes history, you see. That's why it is called Eden, "paradise." In Europe, you can -- any -- any beginning of a cathedral building is the laying down of a little precinct, which is called "paradise." "Paradise" is only the biblical expression for "nature," for what is not yet history.

And then it begins at the portals. In all -- any medieval cathedral, you see Adam and Eve. And you go, and if -- sometimes they have seven -- seven vaults. It begins with Adam and Eve, and ends with the Last Judgment. After Adam and Eve, the first age of mankind; you have Noah; then you have Moses and the Prophets; then you get Christ; and then you get the Church; and that you get the era of the Holy Spirit; and then you get the Last Judgment.

And so any -- any man who goes to church--not you, gentlemen, because you are not men, but just adolescents--men who go to church should live in church as the eternal human being who knows that man has to go from nature to prehistory, to the yearning, to the promise of the ancient covenant, into the nar- -- through the narrow gate of his crucifixion, and then rise again and reside with the saints, and expect the second coming of Christ.

Now that is assumed in every medieval church, gentlemen, as being within the power of every faithful, that he can live the seven ages of the Church by one visit to -- in the church. And before you have not an inkling of this, you do not know what it means to celebrate a holiday.

So the seven canonical hours at one point, gentlemen, packing into the day of among the seven ages, and the architecture of the cathedral, taking you there from Paradise--via the Fall, and through the Great Flood, into the Revelation, and into the Redemption--try to do the same thing: to make every drop in the ocean as perfect as the whole ocean. You will admit that in a drop of water, you have the whole of -- of the ocean, because all the other drops are just like it. You analyze this drop, and you have the ocean water -- the qualities of the ocean water. And yet it isn't the same, because -- you can master a drop of water, and you can drown in the ocean. And that is the arrogance of you and me, because you can live down 24 hours. And you cannot live down eternity, or the all -- whole length of time, I should say more carefully. You think that the day is under your domination. And about these millions of years, you forget.

If you could bring yourself to treat this drop in the -- of water in the ocean with the same reverence as though it was the whole ocean, you cannot object to this as any superstition. The whole secret of the ocean is in this drop of water, is it not? It's no reason that you should think that your chemical analysis exhausts the significance of this water. Think what it means, that California ma- -- may

have to go to war against Colorado, because they have not enough water. Water is a very, very intriguing thing, because you and I, we just all come from water. And water is life-giving, and life-directing. And we would all die without water. So there -- a certain reverence for water I think is most normal to every one of us.

You know, the Persians had as their whole religion two things: don't pollute the streams and the wells, and don't say a lie. And I think the religion that is most remote from America is this Persian religion. It's a very simple religion, gentlemen, but I -- which I think one could very well live by. I think our friend {Kramer} would say that this is a world religion which deserves to be recognized as a lasting religion, even. You see, it -- it hasn't to be ashamed of itself, it can hold up its head as a perfectly sufficient religion. If you really never say a lie, and never pollute a stream, Sir, you are a believer in God. Because you believe in His creation, you see, and you believe that you are His creature, which is all that's demanded from us. If you don't say a lie, you see, you'll say that speech is a divine gift. And if you do not pollute a stream, you say that the earth is a divine gift. So that's all that has -- is needed for a good living.

I only mean to say, gentlemen, that the problem of the holiday is the same as the problem of the drop of water, or a crust of bread. If you teach your children to throw away bread, or if you say, "Bread cannot be thrown away," that's all the difference of your religion. If you feel that -- no food can be destroyed wantonly, you are on the side of the angels. That is, you are able to see in a crust of bread the whole of creation, just as the Persians see in one drop of water, you see, the whole of God's pure -- very pure creation. If you however say, "I can shit into the water"--which they, as you know, did, for years here at the Mary Hitchcock Clinic -- literally; they put their feces into the -- into the Connecticut River--then you have no religion. That is, you have no relation to your own existence with regard to creation. You shall -- this little -- I may worship God as the maker of the whole universe, but when it comes to practical application, the Connecticut River is excluded from God's creation, you see. And the Mary Hitchcock Clinic did.

Everything then depends on a holiday, gentlemen, on reversing our weekday attitude. On a weekday, we are forced by necessity to use parts of the universe as our slaves, as our servants. And on a holiday, we reverse the process, gentlemen. What is a Roman holiday? A Roman holiday is a day in which the servants become kings, and the kings become servants. You know, the so-called Roman holiday is a day in which the saturnalia in Rome, you see, in which the masters would become the servants of their serfs -- of their slaves. But that's something very profound. You can't have a holiday without this reversal.

In any holiday, all your usefulnesses, gentlemen, all the exploitation, all

your right to deal with other men, or with things of nature, as you please, you see, ceases. You can't have a holiday without standing on your head, without reversing the order of your weekday behavior. And that only comes when you can suddenly see that these little things which you use, or kill--like fleas, the water which you pollute, or which you drink, or which you delete, or which you extinguish--that this is part of the whole, that is much bigger than you --. If you cannot see in the babe in the manger in Bethlehem the representative of the whole human race, you obviously cannot celebrate Christmas, you see, if it is just one brat, you see, one delinquent -- juvenile delinquent child. Illegitimate, and what-not. No home, you see, no nativity, not even {fingerprinting}.

That's why Jesus had to be born in a manger, because you cannot celebrate a holiday without reversing all your attitudes of weekday. If He isn't the savior of the world, gentlemen, you see, then there is no Christmas. But on the surface of things, He isn't, because He's just one, the tiniest, poorest, you see, most deserted and abandoned baby in the whole universe.

This reversal then, gentlemen, of the relation of you to the universe, and of you to your fellow man comes -- is only possible if this little moment of time can represent the whole of time. And that is totally lost on us. I say that most people in this country laugh at even the suggestion that they should treat 24 hours, or 48 hours, or three months as representing the whole of history of mankind. They think I am stark mad. I think that they are stark mad. And there is no compromise between the -- us two. Thank you. Let's have a break.

[tape interruption]

It may -- gentlemen, what I've said so far may suffice to show you why the individual experience of a holiday always is incomplete. That is, we all get in one year perhaps one corner of the whole meaning of a holiday. And the holidays are celebrated annually, so to speak, because in the course of a life, we may pass through all the aspects of a holiday. That's the first thing: that the individual layman can only share, or participate in the meaning of such a celebration, that he cannot possibly get it all. In the Olympic Games, the umpire, and the athlete, and the spectators obviously get very different aspects of the holiday. It can't be helped. Yet it is a real holiday, if all together vicariously communicate, and feel -- form one big man in a church. You go -- Easter service, where it may be the priest only or the bishop who fully goes through all the excitement, the ups and downs, from the washing of the feet on Thursday -- on Maundy Thursday, to the kindling of the lights and the new colors of the Church on a -- Easter Sunday. And most of the faithful only get a very little glimpse of the -- either the joy or the mourning. Protestants mourn on Good Friday, and the Catholics or the Greeks -- Orthodox especially rejoice on Easter Sunday. And so there is a very

nice division of labor between the various parts of Christianity, and --.

But this does not mean that I'm wrong in my saying that a holiday is the power that forms peoples. If there is no 4th of July, gentlemen, and no Thanksgiving, there will be no United States of America. They are the conditions of your identity in the world. You must see how serious the di- -- total disappearance of such a holiday may be. You may only see the turkey and the gravy on a Thanksgiving. As long as you admit that Thanksgiving imposes on you a discipline, you are always welcome to impose this discipline more fully on you. That is, holidays wait for us. It isn't only true that we expect them, but the -- the beneficial work of the Church, for example, is that it has such patience, she's there all the time. And if you should at some -- day in your life wake up to the fact that it might be good to join a church, you will find her ready to receive you. You never give it a thought at your age that perhaps it is very strange that you are given so much time to consider this step; and that in the meantime, all these poor faithful must pay dues, and get bored in empty churches so that one day you may be al- -- able to get there.

You take it for granted, gentlemen, that the -- world not only owes you a living, but also owes you -- opportunity of finding your way in the inheritance of the human race. You never give that a thought, that is rather surprising that these few remaining Christians have had the patience and the sacrificial mood to keep these doors waiting for you. "Oh that's no consideration" of yours, you say. "That's my pleasure whether I go or not." But obviously, gentlemen, it isn't your pleasure. It is a very com- -- a very complicated process. A child cannot say, "I don't want to learn." It has to learn.

We come now to the second question: how many of such inherited qualities, or how many cycles of such acquired faculties are needed? And we live here I think in a very important change of the times, because we are the first generation -- or we two -- you and my -- we two gener- -- my two -- are -- your and my generation is perhaps the first group in humanity which must say openly and publicly that there is a plurality of calendars educating us, and it is the plurality that is necessary.

To show you the opposite tradition, and it may help you to explain your own dilemma: up to 1900, in all parts of the world, some group had the hope that at one time all people would have one and the same calendar, and the same holidays, under the same authority. The Romans still believe that one day the pope will rule all the faithful. That is, they will all celebrate the Ro- -- the holidays of the Roman Catholic Church, and they will be the compelling holidays; and all other holidays will be of no importance, really. They will have a monopoly. But the same is true, as we shall see, of other authorities. The Roman Catholic

Church is not the only one that has hoped for the last 1900 years one day to rule the minds of men. The Free Masons also have hoped that the genius of man would only celebrate its own products. If you go to a lodge of Free Masonry, they have the same strange notion that man could live only by the secular holidays of the human mind.

We can see this by the order of the Church holidays. If you analyze this -- this claim hitherto, that every time that should we -- should be evoked to consider the whole of time may be contained in one calendar and of one authority. The authority of our church, or the authority of our educational institution of Dartmouth College, or whatever it may be.

Give you an example. If you take Christmas, and Pentecost, and Easter, as you know, Pentecost would restore language, speech, because at Pentecost we talked in all the tongues. And we learned the right use of our own speech, as a part -- as one ray from the universal sun of the inspiration, or from the Holy Spirit. Very strange that this country shouldn't celebrate Pentecost so long. The Puritans didn't celebrate it. Because this is the country of innumerable tongues, of many tongues. It's the crucible, it's the melting pot. So certainly -- Pentecost is the -- the holiday of America. And as you know at this moment there are springing up everywhere in this country the Pentecostal sects which try to remind you that we are latter-day saints. The Mormons are the first Pentecostal sect. And Pentecost is the day of the pouring out of the spirit, and the revivification of human speech, that we shall say what we mean, but also mean what we say, you see. And that is unheard-of in America, where nobody says what he means, and where nothing means what it says.

The second holiday is the holiday of Easter, in which the empires of this world clash with the human soul. Pontius Pilate is representative of imperial Rome. And all empires in all days crush the free soul. So Easter reminds us how the law of -- the country should always be measured up to higher standards, how the law of each empire--including the United States, gentlemen--is always less just than we should aim to be. Easter is the judgment of the judges. Pontius Pilate is the judge, and he is judged at Easter. And therefore, just as Pentecost corrects the tribal superstitions of the totems of the tribe, and tells us to -- to treat the language as one grain of the whole sand, so I think justice and the judges are the topic of Easter. Here is a man justly condemned, according to the law of Israel, and unjustly condemned according to the law of God.

So Easter has to do with the second inheritance of our race, with written law, with buildings and monuments, with the historical countries of the world. And of course, at Christmas, the fatherhood of God over all His children, those born outside the law, and those born inside the law--between Gentiles and

Jews--is established. Christ is born as a Gentile in a Jewish country. And that makes Him the first citizen of the whole world. And so Christmas is the correction, so to speak, of the old Israel, where you had to be one of the people in order to be saved.

So the Church--in the -- celebrating Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost--has tried to give to every nation an inkling of its righteous gift of speech, righteous gift of law and writing, righteous gift of worshiping God as a fa- -- Our Father in Heaven, and our own fathers on earth as their rep- -- His representatives. The true Israel, and the true tribe, and the true empire come to the fore in these three holidays. Yet you will admit there is absolutely no hope that the law will be passed in the United States that everyone has to celebrate Christmas, and Easter, and Pentecost. And in this sense, the unity of this calendar--also I think very magnificent, and to me perfectly satisfactory in my own life--would -- won't work. That is, the 160 million Americans cannot be put under this constraint. And certainly the Russians can't.

And what we are watching today is a very different process, gentlemen. The breaking-apart of the authorities which impose on a newborn child the experiences of true speech, true law, true religion--or true fatherhood, as I said--and whether we like it or not, we have to admit the fact that there is more than one calendar which encircles us in order to educate us. The picture last time was that here, I enter this world as a child, and I am led to believe that if I follow the year of the Church, then I will come out as an educated person and go on into the future, loaded with the whole impact of my civilization, of my tradition. I think what is so difficult for -- for us, who have lived through two world wars, is to accept the fact that perhaps we have to receive, or to acknowledge the receipt of our education now from various authorities, that it is neither Dartmouth College, nor the federal government, nor any church that alone holds sway over your and my formative period of dis- -- being disciplined, that there are more agencies than one. And I think it is worth your while to look into this matter more deeply and to perhaps come to the conclusion that there are--to put it, I mean in a rather arbitrary way--that there are four circles into which we all have to swing to get the -- to be projected, to get --how do we call this?--the impetus, to get the impetus, you see, which shall throw us into the future, fully endowed with all the implements, you see, that poster- -- the past has prepared.

It's much simpler than you think if you will consider as a starting point the story in the New Testament. The same Lord, who seems today to most Christians to be the Lord of Easter, and Christmas, and Pentecost--that is, the Lord of a ritualistic imposition on our education, on our training of our soul--also has left us with a very strange message. This reads in the Gospel of St. Luke that He sees a man working on the Sabbath. And He says, "My dear man, if you don't know

what you do, you are cursed. But if you know what you are doing, you are blessed."

I've quoted this quite often; many of you must have hear -- hear- -- heard me say this. But it remains an important story, because it is the institution of pluralism into this world, and to this day, nobody has ceded it, before William James. He was the first to recognize that a new daw- -- day of civilization of mankind dawns when we admit that I have to go to church, and I have not to go to church. And both is true. And only the man who says, "I have neither to go to church, nor have I to do anything else," is wrong. Very difficult for you to understand.

As you know, the libertine, or the so-called -- in the Church -- language of the old-timers, the antinomian, the man who says, "There is no law for man," can say, "Well, I sit at home, and I do as I please." Well, he's not a human being. He's totally uninteresting and I cannot teach him. And I do not attempt to talk to him. He's just -- I mean, I don't care for his existence. He's an animal. A decent fellow says, "What has to be done?" And he does it. But then he wakes up to the fact that he -- something better has to be done. And there are three levels of behavior, gentlemen. Your {big} level; and the level of the lawful, law-abiding citizen; and the level of the creative spirit who hears at this moment what is -- he is ordered to do. And that may be much better than going to church.

So there are three levels in this story. And you of course always confuse 1 and 2; and therefore you laugh at 3. You say, "I don't have to go to church, because I have something important to do." If I look what it is, you play in bred- -- bridge. So you have nothing important to do. Then you'd better go to church, because it is important by tradition. But if you have something much better to do, by all means, don't go to church.

This is the problem, gentlemen, of the calendar-man. To have no calendar is to be an animal. To have the first calendar is to be -- to wait for one's own new calendar. But in any sense--however you interpret this world of our -- of the New Testament--the great prophecy there is that man must live by more than one calendar: one to come, and one of old. And that's already a great act of deliverance, as you can see, you see. There must be more than one calendar in our existence. That's how I read this story. It is very disagreeable to the fundamentalists; it's very disagreeable to the liberals. Jesus was neither a liberal nor a fundamentalist. You can be sure of that. But He knew that the old had to be kept, and the new had to be created. And therefore, there always was one more calendar to come.

Now let us analyze the in- -- inevitable calendars which surround you

and me, which train us. I think anybody who has worked in a factory or in an office during summer, or in vacation time, and has made some money at the Post Office in Boston and lost too many -- so much Christmas mail, knows the exacting training that is involved in modern work. And therefore the calendar of the working man, of the weekday is today a real discipline. It's very aesthetic. You cannot follow your whim in your work today. You have just to do what the machine demands, or what the routine demands. And therefore the first calendar which forms all of us is the working calendar, which, as those of you who have read The Multiformity of Man, is restless -- is a natural calendar, you see, without any holiday. It's in itself a worship of the natural fact that nature does not stop. It is the first calendar after 4,000 years, gentlemen, which again recognizes the fact that nature is incessant and perpetual. The Russians call it "Perpetual Revolution." We call it -- the 13 months of the bank calendar--you know they have 13 months to figure out the interest payments, because they want to have an even divisions between the -- the month --. A very strange idea of these people, you see. They hate, of course, February, because 28 days, totally irregular. I love it, because my money lasts a little better, in February.

The working calendar, gentlemen, could stand in total harmony with the outer nature. Just as the water always runs, and al- -- the sun always rises, so the work goes on 24 hours a day. Ebb and tide, day and night...

[tape interruption]

...so to speak, in our life when we work. We are absolutely the saints of this avalanche of time which presses on us never -- a friend of mine is working in a big tool factory in Germany, and -- a very famous factory, as a matter of fact, for its refined tool-making. And he says industry is so terribly depressing. They have still a 58-hour week or a 72-hour week. He has no time even to write me a letter. And when he does, he's so exhausted. It's always overtime when he writes, so to speak. And he says, "{ } everything should have happened yesterday. That's the character of industry." It's a very wise remark. Time is so pressing, that the manager will always say impatiently to the foreman, you see, "You would have done this yesterday," because the ideal is to curtail the production time, you see, to such an extent, that the product should -- could already, you see, be delivered as of yesterday. It's a very witty remark, you see. The work should really be done -- have done yesterday. That's the slogan of industry, curtailing the -- the -- the -- output -- time -- time for output so much that time is already over -- over with. It's pressing so hard on us. And there is no holiday. And without this experience of a time situation in which there is, so to speak, no letup--as we say today, "no letup"--I think we -- we would not have any hope to perhaps build up a new sense for the holiday. But I'm quite cheerful that in a world in which the industry knows of no letup, where the subway in New York--I think it runs 24 hours a

day, doesn't it? There are no wee hours. There -- are cars running on the subway between 2 and 6 in the morning? Well, that's a typical, then, industrious conveyor-belt existence, you see. And probably it would be much wiser to use the subway only at that hour, because it's the only time where you wouldn't be crushed.

We have here one calendar which is so bizarre, that although it disciplines us, it makes us more energetic, more active, it is impossible to think of it as the only calendar. Every one of us needs a -- quite a different calendar. I have given you an example of an absolutely opposite calendar in the college calendar in "Time-bettering Days." The college calendar is an invention of America in a way, to the extent that it here masters everything. Anybody who is a man of leisure, a man of independent means does not follow the 365-day-a-year of production, and of the Amer- -- of the New York subway. But he's following today more or less the -- something of the academic year. He takes it easy between June and September, and still easier from September to June. And he's a man of leisure, the man of independent means, gentlemen. Don't forget that the working calendar is for the man of dependent means, of me- -- who depends on his work. And that the ideal today is just the opposite: the man of independent means who has leisure.

So we have now a calendar of leisure in pure -- in a pure manner. Studies and sports during the -- eight months of the year, and some insight into the serious business of wheat- or -- or hay-making, or something, or going across the ocean or so, in summer. It is -- stands on its head. The vacations in this -- for the -- are -- for the student have become his serious business, and the college has become his play existence. And that's simply true, I mean. So the vacation is the time where you're seriously employed and make mo- -- profitably employed, and make money. And the -- the -- here, this time is where you're wasting your time. I'm convinced of that.

We have two calendars already. I'll show you two more. Thank you.