Transcript
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I think we were quite lucky about yesterday. Without this misunderstanding yesterday -- and I think it was total -- you would not understand why I always insist to speak at least three times. I think it's a curse of modern man to think that in one lecture anything can be conveyed to anybody except misunderstanding. So I presented my friend {Coleman} tonight with a little book in which I had written ca- -- "The promotion of further misunderstandings."
For this is a very deep reason. Since we live in a technological era in which we try to do things quickly, on -- on a vast scale, in which we think that a television set that is nationwide must be better than a local television's performance, in which everything is measured on planetary or lunacy terms -- the ancients thought that lune- -- to me- -- to have to do with the moon meant to be mad, you see. We think to be -- to go to the moon means wisdom. But in this strange situation in which size is adored, and brevity and shortness, also -- any important thing has to be -- explicitly be brought back to its own time measure. And you cannot experience time in one lecture, because your dealing with one hour is that it is the smallest possible unit for any intellectual process, and that if you can compress something in one hour, then you have the best form of intellectual understanding. Of course you have the worst form, because nothing is understood before it is misunderstood. And if you do not expose yourself to misunderstanding, you will never understand. Nobody does. I mean, therefore an examination at the end of your course won't help. What you know at the end of the course is only the very beginning of what the course should mean to you later. I must under- -- I understand now what I learned when I was 18. And I hope that some of you will have the courage to confess that they are still waiting for understanding anything.
This is also true with the newest event. The Peace Corps in this form, in which it is at this moment presented to you, and offered to you, and expects from you your services, is a very embryonic form. And we who have been in this now for a whole life foresee that it will not be the last form. And you of course think I am obsolete and you are very young, and therefore you must know better and do better. I'm sorry to say that isn't -- it may be, but it isn't sure. It is possible that somebody who foresaw the necessity of the Peace Corps could avoid certain downfalls in which -- which will not be spared you. And perhaps it is very disappointing what you go through with the Peace Corps. Nobody knows yet. You can become a nationalistic humbug. You can spread the word around in India that Americans are so ego-centric that they only think America's hamburgers are good. I don't think they eat hamburgers there.
Time is of the essence for our living and understanding. And if you look at this technological, strange law that every invention widens the space, shortens the time, and destroys an old grouping, you can very well ask yourself which is the measure of time which you have to go -- to give to any real peaceful endeavor among human beings. Our life is 70. The Bible thinks the maximum is 80. It has been prolonged now to 90 and 100. They speak of "old as Methuselem," as you know, in Bernard Shaw. And it's quite terrifying to see that on one-hand side we can speak to each other in one minute acr- -- around the globe, and on the other hand, people are put away at 60 or 65 as obsolete and then they have to live another 30 years. It will all have to happen to you, too.
And so the meaning of time is at this moment threatened as -- I think as it has never been threatened before. If time is shortened, can then any human change really be brought about by this -- in this haste? It is already a tremendous step forward in acknowledging of this contradiction that we have to live longer and can do everything in shorter time. You see the contradiction. That you are asked to serve two years. When the thing began, when the Quakers had their first camps, they thought six weeks was already a tremendous thing. And they put it a vacation time, which is play time, so that the Quaker camps have always suffered from this lack of seriousness, you see. Anything shorter than three months is not serious, you see. And -- and nothing that is shorter than a year lasts in your life. That's an old saying, which I recommend to you as a solace for your discomforts. Nothing that is -- lasts shorter than a life is important in a -- in a -- for the formation of a human character, the formation of a human relation.
All this is unknown today. People insist that you can be serious, and become friends and become also enemies in much shorter seasons. You cannot. God has created man in generations. And only when three generations agree on anything is there peace. Peace is conditioned by lasting out your own death, your own disappearance, your own giving-up your position in life and being replaced by another president of the United States, or by another delegate, you see, to the United Nations, or by another man as the director of -- of some big factory, or whatever it is. Replacement of us mortals is a condition for a peaceful order, because if at the removal of you as head of the household, there's rebellion, there's bloodshed, obviously there's -- the thing has not been successful.
Peace, however, is the form in which these transitions can take place without shaking the order. This country has been able to shift -- change peacefully presidents now for -- how long? 180 years. And that makes it a real country, a real democracy. If, as in Mexico, with a change of president you always have a revolution, you would have to admit that this was not a peaceful order, you see, because the decisive point of peace is that the transition from one human being to another in the various functions, you see, takes place without bloodshed,
without enmity, without hostility, without hatred, without disruption. You will go to countries where this is, as you well know, absolutely not that safe. I mean, Mrs. Gandhi had to become, as I see it, I may be wrong, I -- you know more about this -- but she had to become president in order to avoid bloodshed, to avoid disruption. The authority of her relationships to Nehru made this possible. It's not a question of personal fitness. I don't doubt this. I have no i- -- judgment in this matter. But that's not the true story of her being the successor, you see. The true story is that it was because of her propinquity to the -- to the throne, it was possible to compel all others to take it quietly. With anybody else, they might not have done so. These are really the important forms of -- in government to be -- to be considered, that the others do not begin to shoot, and not to pay taxes, or not to emigrate, or what have you.
Now since time is of the essence, you can say that the Peace Corps is faced not with this great problem that the world has become one, that the space has been -- become gigantically big, that all inventions are immediately usable in all countries. This first form of technological progress, that space becomes wider and wider, is not what makes your existence in this -- in this service indispensable. This the nations of the whole globe now know, accept in some form or other, at least the governments; and for this reason, there would be no Peace Corps necessary if the gain of space was the only thing to be put through. For the unification of space, it is only necessary that -- technician goes everywhere, and builds a telephone, or a cable, or a television station, or some satellites in the air. You can see that the technol- -- -ologists, the engineer, is needed for certifying that space shall be one for all people.
With the shortening of time, however, there is this tremendous question: how can the seconds in which we flash signals through the air, and send you -- I mean, a -- a play in a quarter of an hour, or a drama in three-quarters of an hour or an hour -- how can this time enter a human heart in such a way that after two generations, the vestiges will still be felt? If you consider your own memory and just enumerate the movies you have seen in the last 10 years, how they have been photographed one upon the other, and how little there is left of the individual movie, you will understand that my question is quite useful, because the more you have seen at various evenings, or afternoons, or mornings on television, and in movies, or in theaters for that matter, the less has one of them been able -- allowed to bear fruit. The more is just a -- a sum of photographs. And the funny thing, if you photograph one picture upon the other, you know how it looks afterwards. It is worthless. It's fruitless. And the fruitlessness of our mental processes has reached a remarkable degree.
Nothing what you see in these last 10 years you will probably deem worthy to communicate to your grandchildren, or to your children even. You will say, "Oh,
they go to the next movies." But if this was so, if you allow them to go to their movies and treat you as obsolete, and say, "Well, my parents of course -- they went to French movies. We only go now to Abyssinian movies," which you -- they probably will -- for a change, that would mean that your children would be barbarians, and would upset everything you have created or you have done. And this danger is very large. It looms. In all these new countries -- go to the African countries. I won't mention India. The danger is that all the good there is discarded, you see, in favor for the latest news.
How then do we enlarge our time horizon? Never mentioned. If you read psychology books, they really think that a minute beget -- 60 minutes beget an hour, and 24 hours beget a day, and 365 days beget a year. In other words, time is treated as built up aus -- of time bricks, or time seconds. And if this was so, there would be no hope for us. The Tower of Babel would be what we call "time." It would be the compound of moments. And the moments would make no sense together. And most people live in this daydream that this is so. And they hasten from one leisure to another, from one cocktail party to another cocktail party. And the very word "cocktail" of course is the best definition of the treatment of time, you see. You mix some ingredients and this you call then time, or you call it cocktail. It's the same thing. That is, your time consists of absolutely discontinuous units. And you swallow it. You get drunk on it, as you do at cocktail parties; embrace your worst enemy and go home and forget. Most people live this way, in the big cities. And they are quite proud of it, of their -- faculty to stand all their enemies. At cocktail parties, you know, you would even embrace your future murderer.
Time treated as a cocktail is the -- is the curse of all of us. It offers itself to this, and the physicist says, you see, time is just an addition of moments. That's what it is: 60 seconds, one minute, and so on and so forth. I don't -- you can do this yourself. Everyone who is alive knows that he wants to live the other way around. His whole life is more important than any one year in his life. Any one year in his life is more important than an hour of toothache. You can stand the toothache if you know that after an hour you can go to the dentist.
That is, time has interruptions. Time has moments. But your and my time is first consistent and one. So is the history of mankind. The history of mankind does not con- -- con- -- consist of 5,000 years B.C. and 2,000 years A.D. But it consists of one big breath of God who creates -- is in process of creating us at this moment. And it appears to us very short-lived, but in fact, you are in the palm of His hands, and you are not the thing He wants to create. But He wants to create more than you and me. And we are inside of this.
And what I tried to say yesterday of peace is conditioned on this fact that
peace is around us, above us, before us, after us, and if it isn't, then there would be -- just the end of the world. There would be destruction. And it would be perfectly meaningless for me certainly to stand here and to talk to you about peace and service. You could be entertained in going to India, which some of you probably will hope -- are hoping for. But it has nei- -- nothing to do with peace or with service if what you do is nothing but an addition of moments, of minutes, if it doesn't play a part in the destination of the race. We hope to do something which is indispensable, which we cannot afford not to do.
Don't -- and if -- as -- as old President Calvin Coolidge, who -- who tried to say nothing at all, as you know, was the most silent citizen of Vermont; he's at home here in Plymouth, you see, only 50 miles from here -- he used to say when a law was before Congress and they asked him if he would sign it, or if he should veto it, he always said, "Is it necessary?" And if it wasn't necessary, he would veto it, because we are on this earth to do the necessary things without which the world cannot go on. And the other things are very pleasant for the moment, of -- but of no importance. It is necessary that children are born, you see, and that's there for -- has been marriage. It is not necessary that you amuse yourself at 14 in -- with sex. That's perfectly unnecessary. You can do it. You do it. But it is not necessary. Therefore it is not very important what happens there. Everything you do before you get married will be forgiven you if you don't do it too -- too badly. Therefore the -- the Kinsey Report is uninteresting, utterly unimportant. It doesn't deal with the necessary. It deals with the wanton. And the word "wanton" is a very good word to des- -- describe the superfluous.
For your own life, that is important which is necessary, in which you fulfill an indispensable task in the community. And it is all the more important the fewer people know that it is necessary ahead of time. And I hope you all know have ahead of time grasped the fact that your acts are necessary, although many in the community don't understand it. And the more this is so, the less applause you at this moment receive from -- people at home, perhaps the more necessary it is, and the more illustrious. He who does the one thing necessary all alone, against an -- an army of enemies, he's of course the greatest. That's why the Crucifixion ranks as the one greatest act in humanity, because He was the only one who grasped that it was necessary, to show that in defeat we can be victorious. Nobody had ever dared to say this, or to do this. And that is -- remains the one necessary act and the one not recognized by anybody else, except the doer.
To a certain extent, gentlemen, a doctor who for the first time does an operation does the same thing. He risks his whole reputation. If the operation miscarries, you see, he can be through with his job forever. And so everyone -- once to every man and nation comes the hour to decide -- that's the famous old hymn. And that hasn't changed. But the condition for your believing me at all is that
you must see that in human time, it is very different as it -- we tre- -- treat astronomical time, or mathematical time, or physical time. Your lifetime has nothing to do with the stopwatch. Absolutely nothing. It is, as any organic process, you see, a phase in bearing fruit.
Now you will admit that a flower that goes then to seed and brings forward its -- its fruit in season, cannot be judged for its momentary time, for that little moment. It has a curve to go through. And that's predestined. And from the very beginning the end is in sight, although you don't see anything in the -- in the budding flower, how the apple or the pear will look at the end. Yet it's all one process. Now believe me, we Americans here -- and the Indians, the Hindus, too, and the Africans -- we are all as much in the palm of our creator's hand as His apple is on the tree, while he's budding in spring. There's no difference between us and them. And His purpose, first to create this strange world of separate nations where everybody found his way into some niche; in South America, the {Bo- -- Otoes}, Mongolians coming from Asia over the Bering Strait, marching through the whole of the American continent and finally now being found in the midst of Brazil -- in this same manner, all of us have been dispersed. This great diaspora, this great dispersion of the nations is the first act of this spectacle. And if you go to India, you will first be struck by the distinction, by the fact that these people are dispersed as compared with you. Then this dispersal had to go on until the man of men was found who could set an example for all these nations, all their dialects, their black and their white colors.
You find the dispersal, by the way, if I may hark back for one minute, because it's such a miraculous story. They now have found in Kam- -- in Kambotscha an Eskimo race. Eski- -- a group of Eskimos fearing the blood feuds, the vendetta, you see, by some other group, marched on -- marched on to evade the vendetta, the vengeance of their neighbors, and is now -- has now been found out by anthropologists as living in Kambotscha. Only to show you that flight, fleeing, fu- -- being fugitive from law, as it is in the Bible, in the chapter on Cain, you see, is a true story. The first act of mankind was dispersal, because the hatred between stepmother and father-in-law, et cetera, is still mentioned today in jokes, but mostly sons-in-law now get along with their mother-in-law. Formerly they didn't. They went off. They went off very far, and the dispersal is the instinctive friction between family -- members of a family. It is not true that members of a family get on together well. It's not natural. We go -- get on together well, because we have so many ways out in school and colleges, so that to see your parents occasionally is a very nice idea, you see. But when I was young, there always appeared a column in the Z- -- in my newspaper: "My Family Cramps My Style."
And as we read the history of mankind, the first -- the first oc- -- occurrence has
been that the -- the families cramped their style, and Cain always migrated. And that's how the earth -- the first act of -- of creation, of mankind then consisted of dispersal.
There have been perhaps 100,000 different languages spoken. They all have been created by human beings who broke away from the language spoken hitherto. Now 100,000 -- it's an arbitrary number -- but there are 10,000 African languages known to us, so it is not an exaggeration if I say 100,000. These languages all mean historical acts. They all mean a -- setting aside a special time for the people who spoke this language, because speaking a language means to get out of one part of history, one epoch, one century and entering in your own. So language and time has very much to do with each other. The fact that you now have to learn a little of Hindu is already a peacemaking endeavor, because you cancel out thousands of years in which these languages dispersed, you see. Went out.
I say this because you must not think that anything in human history is natural. Everything is supernatural. The languages also. There are no natural languages. To call your mother your mother, and to have the mother call you "my son" is always an act of divinity, always a religious act. To name each other, you see, and recognize that you can't sleep with your mother, and the mother recognizing -- or the father -- that he must not marry his daughter, that is always faith. And that's the oldest story of mankind. Mankind would have perished if incest had been permitted. So chastity is the first law of the tribe.
This is not natural. And what I've tried to do is to show you that history, from the very beginning and all the time in which you move, has nothing to do with nature. You are under the protection of the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit has created mankind. And as long as there will be a mankind at all, it can only move under this strange spirit that knows the ends, that knows your destination, and that spares you in -- in many ways for all your own follies, and all our own shortcomings, and has very great patience with us. Every one of us can make a thousand mistakes, and still at the thousand-and-first time, he's pardoned, and somebody comes to his rescue -- perhaps a nice policeman -- and says, "Don't do it."
How -- how come -- isn't that a very strange world in which we are forgiven all the time? I mean, if you figure out how many mistakes -- deadly mistakes from babyhood you have tried to make and to commit, and how very rarely you have been allowed to -- to commit them really, you see how lucky we are, h- -- what -- how much providence is already around in the form of all the offices which have been appointed from time immemorial to spare you these -- these innumerable -- the consequences of your innumerable mistakes. So man is this
strange being that is allowed to make mistakes under the protection of a mild providence that allows man to come to your rescue and say, "Yes, you have made this mistake, but it can be forgiven you." There is a doctor, and there is a policeman, and there is a schoolteacher, and there is a kindergarten nurse, and there are all kinds of people who will straighten this out, and the consequences will not be as bad as you really would deserve it.
That is, mankind from the very beginning has tried to outlast the individual human life. Always have three generations at least try to cooperate. Always have there been grandparents, and parents, and children, and children's children together. And only in this way do we exist. Not one of us could live on the idiocy of your contemporaries. Any group of contemporaries is idiotic. If they meet, as in Rotary clubs, go to sleep. I mean, the -- the hell today is that only contemporaries meet. And they have nothing to say to each other. All wisdom, all -- everything important is where the young man says -- and an old man are together, the young man says, "You are too old," the old man says, "You are too young" -- that's the beginning of wisdom.
Well, really, everything interesting is only -- and everything true is only there if age makes no difference. As soon as you are a teenager, Sir, that is good for -- what is this infamous magazine which now sells 4 million teenagers? What is it called? It has a special teenagers' magazine, isn't it?
(Playboy.)
Wie?
(Playboy.)
No. I didn't mean this. This is for 21.
(Mad?)
Well, I only see it in the ads, you see, where they boast that they -- all the teenagers read them.
But you understand very well that all the instincts of a commercial character of mankind try to tear down this architecture of generations. Everything what we call commercial means to disrupt the flow of time of history and appeal to your momentary instinct. And that's why it is disruptive, why a commercial society is contemptible. Why it is the devil. It is the devil incarnate, the people who make you buy unnecessary things, because you don't have this money then for the decisive act, for example, of getting married.
Everything important must be measured -- by its degree of importance for all generations. And that's most interesting. And every one of you, I hope, has some ancestor in the family to whom you can speak business much better than to your contemporaries. There may be only one. And if you have none, then try to find one outside the family. But these talks with one such person are more important than 50 football games. Because -- why? Because the line of the future, from the past in the future, can only be determined, as in mathematics, if you have three points. You can only determine by -- by three data a triangle. Well, in the same sense, the direction of your life can only be pinpointed if there are some older, your age group, and some younger. If you don't have this in your mind and in your heart, you are a beast of the field, but not a human being. It may be a rich man who wants to endow a college, and that may be his -- his pipe dream, you see. He still thinks when he wants to endow and leave a name, like the Rockefeller Foundation, the man is still connected with future generations.
He was 90 when he did this. You know why he did it? His -- a newspaperman went to Mr. Rockefeller -- I think he was 89 -- and said, "Do you know that you are the -- most hated man in America?"
Mr. Rockefeller was shocked and said, "What can I do?"
And this gentleman, this newspaperman, said, "I will help you to erase this and to leave behind for future generations a different name of Rockefeller." And that's why we have the Rockefeller Foundation.
So he came to his senses in the last minute, really. He repented. That is, he reconnected himself with the future of his country and of mankind. And today the name "Rockefeller," you see, is so good that you can even become governor of New York.
It is very strange that this connection between three generations -- this pinpointing -- who is your ancestor mentally, spiritually; on whom do you draw to prove that you are worth being elected, for example, you see, and your promise to leave something behind of which your grandchildren will -- still will be proud -- that this is not in the foreground of our education? Obviously, you can't elect a man who doesn't say I -- he's a Jeffersonian, or he's an Adams man, or he -- he is a -- a Lincoln man. They all do. They all quote ancestors, don't they? That's why you elect them, unfortunately. And they always betray you. They -- they may quote Lincoln, but that doesn't prove yet that they are Lincolnians. But they live by this. And there is no Democratic Party and no Republican Party without the quot- -- this quotation of these grandparents of their party. You can't have a party as of today. Only candy manufacturers can.
And that's their shortcoming, I mean. All the things you -- today in the political movement is so flat. It has no roots in the past, and therefore has also no promise for the future. Nothing immediate is worth your political interest. If you go two years to India, that's only worth an investment if it bears fruit -- ja, now comes my ending question -- bears fruit in which time?
When the Russians began their Communism, they began with 5-year plans. And we have now the idea of lengthening the Congress -- duration of Congress members for -- to four years, haven't we? Don't know if it will come about. And the president of the United States is elected for four, and the infini- -- infinitely more wise senators are elected for six years. And this strikes me all as exceedingly short-lived. I said that nothing is important that doesn't outlast one year. But by this, I do not mean that it is long enough to foresee the future for four or six years. Your life is certainly too precious to be wasted in four or six years. And if you go to India and serve two years, it would be foolish to think that the fruits of what you are doing can be seen after two years. It cannot be seen after four years.
You know when it could be seen? If the people with whom you have lived will tell their grandchild that one day this grandchild should go to the United States, and look it over what this queer country was from which such a plant had arrived, then you would be successful. Your own two years you can measure by the yardstick of twice 365 days, altogether 730 days. And you can build it up from scratch, from the unit: one day, two days, three days, four days. Or you can look at it in terms of a century, or as I prefer, in terms of three generations and if your two years for- -- make a dent inside this century, then you have made a place for the Peace Corps, because then it affects people where it matters, in their species, in their belonging to the whole of India.
The -- the English have recognized this. They are very wise people. They are an aristocracy; and therefore they have always figured that three generations are needed before a Churchill is a Churchill. And that's why it is important that -- he is a Churchill, you see, because his ancestor fought at Malplaquet. And he has written the history of his -- of his ancestor, as you know, who was a very wicked man. But that doesn't matter. He was also a very important man.
Well, the English, knowing this, have always spoken of unrecognized service. In the civil service, they say the most important part of the service is that there are people who have -- are undersecretaries of something, I mean -- have a white-collar job in -- in the -- or on the board of trade, or the board of education, and do their work; and it is not recognized. And the English think that this is the most important work, and that's the work by which the British Commonwealth alone has been built up. Recognized service -- that ranks with Madison Avenue,
with image-making, you know. You can pay people for giving you -- making you -- praising you. But unrecognized service is quite clear, as a woman, that the best things she does will not be labeled loudly. Her lipstick and her dress may be, but what a mother really does, or a sister, or a daughter in the home of man is unrecognizable. It just brushes aside certain cobwebs, and certain hindrances; and the life can go on, and wouldn't be able to go on otherwise.
Now the males in this room may protest, but I have to tell them that in the third millennium in which we -- entering so soon -- in 30 years, it's already ahead of -- before us -- will be in many ways a filial, a daughterly, sisterly affair. That's why women must be in this service, and why you -- we men must not act as brutes, and as soldiers, and as knights, but very much as male nurses, and deacons, and servants. The reason for this is that time has been destroyed by our technology, that we are preponderantly inclined to think that we can count the minutes, and the hours, and the days and then add them up and have a result. The unrecognized service consists in being the -- the cement between those hours and those unconnected dates. I would -- call the unrecognized service the connecting service, the service which ties together different activities in one spirit, and in one peace.
In German, I had occasion to comfort my coun- -- fellow countrymen after the First World War, that this would be all that was left of Germany: this power of the soul to go through dark ages, and con- -- have a continuity without the limelight of images on Madison Avenue, and the town crier, in one form or other, called "advertising." The slow flow of time today is imperiled. Gentlemen, we put it in your hands to restore it.
[tape interruption]
...America { }. It may be very difficult. But don't call it a problem, because then you will make a wrong decision, because then it isn't necessary. Problems can be solved one way or the other. You can always wait for a new inventor who finds a new solution. You are -- life's task however, can only be fulfilled by you. Therefore you are not helped by calling it a problem. You are only helped by investigating whether you can live without it, or you have to go through with it. All important decisions consist in this simple question: is it your business? If it is your business, you have to solve it. As my friend Richard Cabot in Cambridge once said, "Anything that deserves to be done -- doing, deserves to be done badly."
This is very surprising, {Sir}. Most people would say the opposite. But he meant, if a man is musi- -- musical when he plays the piano poorly, for Heaven's sake, let him play the piano, because it deserves to be done. Somebody must play
the piano. Many people must play the piano. One badly, one well. This is unheard-of. Today you always have a maximum of technical perfection, because you think piano playing is something there, and I'm something here. I can do it or leave it. If {you're really} musical, you must play the piano. Or must sing. There's no question that you can leave it. And then it's forgiven you if you do it poorly, because it is better that somebody follows his heart's desire poorly, you see, than that he doesn't -- do it at all.
This is all against all your psychological standards, I know, all against all your efficiency tests and so on. But that's how it is. Real life has nothing to do with -- anything of problem. And anything of plan. I have never planned my life. There are duties. There are challenges. Something has to be done, that's all. In every one case, I mean, I can only wish you that you get into a real quandary, the real difficulties, you see, because that will arouse your -- your energies to the pitch, and then you will -- will {do a righteous thing}. Any act of faith in a man's life will always bear fruit. And anything accommodating the convenient will always ruin you. And that will always happen when you see the problem and go to the expert here and to the expert there and ask, "What shall I do?" You think they ever know? It's your life, you see. I can only live one. Nobody else can interfere with a { }. { } ask for counsel { } what would happen if I do this. And then he may tell you. But more he cannot. He can never say "Do this or that."
Therefore, all plans mean that you can provide bliss and happiness for others. Impossible.
(I'm not asking you to plan my life. I was just...)
But that's the only plan that would be important. The real, live { }, they constitute then the direction life has -- your whole life has to take. I mean, you can plan -- you can plan {when you're old}. I mean, what can we plan is of a technical nature. You can plan the world, Sir. But mankind, you cannot. And you see, the -- the worst that has befallen you all is that you treat yourself as a part of the world. You aren't. You are the children of the -- your creator, and you are in yourselves creators. Are you parts of the world? The world is there to be used. It's the offal, I mean, there's the -- the -- the -- the town dump. That's the world. You are not the dump, yet. Don't treat yourself as worldlings, as pieces of the world. You aren't. By the way, nobody does. And you all figure that you find one girl who doesn't treat you as world, but as the one and only.
If you avoid problem and plan, you will go to Heaven.
(I'd just like one more turn. I -- I've got a quotation from another 19th-century man. Thomas Carlyle in the French Revolution said, "No nation conscious of
doing great -- conscious of doing something great was in fact doing that.")
What?
(Thomas Carlyle, in the -- in the French Revolution said that no nation conscious of -- conscious of doing something great was doing that. I was wondering whether you would apply this to the Peace Corps { } its own awareness of historical destiny is what is going to bring about its downfall.)
Oh, it's too loose, Sir. { } you are not in danger, yet.
(Do you not -- do you not think the Peace Corps is perhaps overplanned, and over-schematized and overstructured?)
(How can you say that after three weeks { }?)
({ }.)
(How can you say that after { }?)
(Well, I would say that Dr. Huessy is { } very much.)
(After the last three weeks, if he could say that, he's a true { }.)
(At least in so far as it has aims, you know, subconscious aims, I think it is perhaps too aware of its own -- coming role.)
It isn't { } to say anything in this matter. Why should I? I don't know it. And my own -- you know, we tried all this 25 years ago here. And my only sorrow is that the -- domestic and the -- the worldwide services are separate. I think that Shriver should be the head of both. I mean, that he had to give up one and go to the other, I'm very sorry. That's -- to be a blemish on the service, because it obscures the fact that our whole globe is in need of this, and not just the Hindus, and -- or the sick. And I -- there are -- more criticisms I have, but they are not in { }, because I think you are very lucky that you have as the head of the Corps somebody who hates bureaucracy more than you do.
(You had a question? Well, thank you very, very much. And I hope you'll visit again.)