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...time of our own pretending that we live in the year of the Lord 1967 would be fake if these four offices were not in full force. If you had no parents in some form--be it a teacher, be it a godfather, be it a nurse, be it somebody who, simply because he is older, saves you from insanity; if you had not poets who can stylize and cultivate your feelings; if you had not prophets to make clear to you that your own aims are ridiculous, and not worth doing because there are higher aims to be fulfilled--that's what a prophet stands for; and if you had not priests incessantly direct you so that you know what is essential in your life--weddings, and childbirth, and perhaps the choice of your real profession, compared to all the chores you are doing, and all the ridiculous weekend parties; if you had not these directors of your life, mankind could not subsist on this planet for 24 hours.

This is quite serious. It's all the more serious, and there is a conspiracy today to deny that the last 6,000 years have achieved anything. Everything is in abeyance. You can do as you please. Gentlemen, we can do less and less. Our freedom is very much curtailed, because we are so -- have grown so big, and so old, and so wide, and so well instituted, that obviously you just have to think of a traffic jam, that your discipline is much greater than that of a Sioux or Apache Indian today. On the road, you know very well that if you do not -- if you swerve and do not follow the rules, you are doomed, and many peo- -- other people are doomed.

But in order to entertain your imagination and your fantasy, we allow you, under this very severe district -- discipline of life on the highway, in a factory, in -- even in a classroom here --. You can yawn--that's the only -- license you can have in a classroom, Sir. He's just yawning -- the --. Otherwise the discipline is very strict. You cannot go naked here, for example.

So in -- in co- -- recompense for the great liber- -- discipline which pervades your body and your soul, your mind is at leisure today to think what he pleases -- what it pleases. But this playboy attitude, gentlemen, is of course the cause of great objection and great sorrow for a man like myself who tries to bring the mind in line with soul and body. What I try to -- to teach, and what all your teachers try to do, is to catch the attention of your mind so that this mind is not flying wild like a bird, but is really on your head, and in your -- over your chest, and in your heart, and in -- over -- governing your genitals. And that is necessary, because the mind today is mad, insane, as all -- any newspaper and any magazine proves.

I have tried to show you that man has, in the last thousand years -- trying

to get hold of the Greek poets and their achievements, by digging deeper, deeper backward all the time. I said to you that in the -- year of the first Crusade, or in the year 1000 of which you know nothing, the year of Otto III, the saint, the emperor of -- of the Holy Roman Empire--a thousand years back, that is--men would have quoted from antiquity, St. Augustine. St. Augustine lived from 354 B.C. to 431. And that was all you had to know of antiquity. He had written a book on the City of God and the city of Rome, and he had buried the city of Rome and said the City of God was the only thing that had mattered. And therefore, after St. Augustine, people were satisfied that there had been a Roman Empire, and there had been Greeks, you see. This was all long ago. And these pagan gods fortunately had been destroyed. And you cannot under- -- hardly believe the sigh of relief that this Neronic empire had gone, this wicked empire in which Caesar had murdered Peter and Paul, and Pontius Pilate had crucified the Lord.

For you, this antiquity is of great glory. You wouldn't have liked to live in Rome, I assure you, when it burned. You would have burned, too. But this is the fantasy of the last 900 years for school -- people how went to high school -- or go to high school now. It's a wonderful time, antiquity. It's called -- you call this the Renaissance, this wanton dream that there has been a wonderful time where everything was fine.

I tried to show you that man has, in a slow progress backward, tried to reconcile his present-day task with this record of the Greeks. The records -- what you call the Renaissance, is a record of 900 years of go- -- digging deeper and deeper, and not only quoting St. Augustine -- St. Augustine, but Caesar; and Virgil, his poet; and Horace; and then go back further and resuscitate Aristotle, and go back further and -- resuscitate Plato; and go once -- one better -- and finally read Homer. And as I said, the last thing in the last hund- -- 50 years has been that they went before Homer and speak of the pre-Homeric Greeks. They speak of the Mycenaean Greeks. They have rediscovered that these Mycenaean Greeks wrote another script than our alphabet. They didn't write Greek, but they -- wrote Cretean. We have deciphered this Cretean stuff, and find already the names of Achilles and Odysseus on these -- on these old bricks. And Mr. Robert Graves has written this very interesting book, Hercules, My Shipmate.

And so we are at this moment at the point where the -- ancient Greece is swallowed up by the more general past of Egyptian, and Babylonian, and Mesopotamian orders and empires. Greece at this moment, so to speak, in its revival is disappearing backward, before there was Greek. And I said the -- the great symptom of this is Friedrich Nietzsche's jump out of Greece from Socrates and Plato away to Zarathustra, the Persian.

So that at this moment, gentlemen, the great glory of Greece, that the Greeks resisted the Persians and fought them at Salamis, and Plataea, and Marathon, has ceased to be a kind of -- cause for glorification, because after all, Zarathustra is the great prophet of these very kings from Persia, who attacked Greece, and who, sadly enough, didn't conquer.

So at this moment, the whole reception of Greece--what you call the Renaissance--is disappearing fast as a normative, wonderful model. We have to save poetry today, separate from Greece. You -- we must be able to know what poetry is, not just by admiring the Greeks, because there is very -- are very many things not admirable about the Greeks. For example, eternal war; there is slavery, mistreatment of women, homosexuality. So it is much worse than LSD. Or wha- -- how do you call it? LSM, LSD? I never know. What is it?

(LSD).

Pardon me. I'm too old for -- for still learning this. This is the latest Greek version of promenading of the mind outside your real mi- -- body and your real soul. The Greeks always tried to play. The poet is playing.

And at this moment, I have to tell you that poetry is in great danger itself, from the side of the serious masses who attack -- which attack it like the proletariat, or the Chinese, or --. And on the oth- -- other hand, poetry has to be saved regardless of the Greeks, and the myths. We have -- re-woven around the Greeks. I think poetry is something eternal, but you cannot quote the Greeks for it, because they have combined their poetry with a reckless and ruthless destruction of womanhood, and destruction of peace, and a destruction of liberty of the enemy. Slavery is not a contribute -- recommendable for people who live in America. Beware of any civilization as a model case which recommends slavery, because you are still -- suffering from the marks of the Southern slavery -- enslavement of the black people. And the question of homosexuality is a great question in this country, because it is a question of impotency of love.

Therefore, we have to face our detachment from Greece. We have -- you have to remain faithful to poetry. But you cannot remain faithful to Greece.

This is at this moment the very serious issue before us. And that's why everything is critical. Read your journals. They are all dancing around this problem that they feel they cannot quote models. I mean -- neither is Plato nor Euripides a model for poetry. We are looking for other ways of being poetical. Perhaps Chinese. I don't know this. The positive you will have to discover yourself. But the negative is sure, that Greece is not the model case for future poets, and for people who enjoy poetry, because you cannot overlook the fact that the

Greeks never got rid of slavery, never got rid of war, and never got rid of an inferior treatment of women. They ha- -- couldn't cope with sex in the proper sense; they couldn't cope with peace in the proper sense; and they couldn't cope with their fellow man.

So the ideal of the last 900 years, that by going back into some -- some other period of Greece, you would find an enthusing model which, if you copied it, you see, would bring you up to -- to par -- is -- is disappearing. At this moment, 1967, the whole -- the whole turn of the millennium of 2000 is therefore for human- -- humanity a very critical one. The old models are vanishing. Peo- -- most people, like Bishop Pike, think it's only the Trinity that is vanishing. Perhaps -- Bishop Pike is vanishing, because he is just a Greek, a very naive Greek, as he showed you when he said that God was unus, or one. I mean, that's Greek, you see, because Greek is of the moment. And I have tried to show you that history becomes only history when you yourself know that you are in three generations. They are a part of your life that's -- is ahead of you, which is still to come. So you live for the future. There is a part of your life which your parents already have made for you. So there you are related to the past. And there is the moment to which you have to give you with your friends, and have to forget your parents, and have to forget the future, even, you see.

And so man is in the strange, enthus- -- threefold enthusiasm of three times in one. And this the poets do not know. The ignoring of the poets of the fullness of time is the secret of poetry. In poetry we get lost in the moment, without having to consider our ancestors. You can read Shakespeare without being a Britisher, can't you? And you can read Homer. And this is a great temptation.

In the year of the Lord 18- -- 87 B.C., the provincials of the Roman Empire staged a great rebellion in Asia Minor. Their leader was Mithridates of Pontus, a great tyrant, and very intel- -- intelligent genius of politics, a kind of Hitler. In order to enthuse his rebel- -- rebels against Rome, he had them all get together in a circus, in a theater, in his -- in -- in Pontus, in his capital, and recite Homer. That is, poetry unites as of the moment. The rebellion broke down. It isn't enough to recite Homer, you see. But it is quite -- you can get people for the moment.

In the year 1897, in this country, in -- even in California, even in Berkeley, there was a very wonderful man, Benjamin Wheeler. He was pres- -- first president of this university. And Benjamin Wheeler has told me himself that when the war between Turkey and Greece broke out, he had his students stand up and recite Greek verses in favor of Salamis and Thermopylae, in favor of the Greek war for liberation. So present, so poetically present was the Greek past to the

president of your university and the -- to the students. And of course, they were still students, so they knew Greek. And they could recite it. And they were one heart and one soul with these soldiers in Greece who liberated Thessaly, which the -- is the land of Achilles, and the land of Pylos, and the land -- the country in which the Olympian gods were housed.

So it's a very short time that -- with the help of poetry, American students could forget where they were, when they were, you see, and identify themselves with these Greeks of 480 B.C.

I doubt that you are in any position to do that. For the rest of your lives, you will have to live without such sparkling identification, I guess. I don't see where it could come from, that you all, this whole class--could get up, you see, and recite with the feeling, "That's me; that's my war of liberation." Wouldn't you agree with me? It's hardly thinkable that there would be any such unanimity.

So we come from a thousand years of poetical identification with some heroic or some glorified past. I doubt that mankind can afford this in the future. It may be very sad that we can't. But I think it is impossible.

We have one data which perhaps may remind you on the frail basis of our enthusiasms. Next door in San Francisco, they are celebrating this week the Chinese New Year. And the Chinese New Year entails their belief that it is the year 4666 of the Chinese era. Now if you divide 4666 into 1460, I don't know if you can--try it, please. If you divide it, how many -- cycles do you get? Because this would mean, you see, that if we knew how often 4- -- in 4,666 1460 is contained, we would know how recent we are, compared to the Chinese belief in the {longeval} history of mankind. And then we wouldn't get up for the Battle of Thermopylae or Salamis. How much is it? 4,666? Has nobody tried to find it?

1460 is a great cycle of Egypt and of China, you see, because Orion rep- -- returns into the same position -- with regard to the sun in the morning of July 19th, every 1460th year. This is the calendar of Egypt, but it is also the calendar of China, by the way it's also the calendar--very related at least--of the Maya and the Yucatan. It's always the same chronology which they have inherited. The Americans obviously learned it from Cambodia, the Cambodia from the Hindus. And there are even people who think that the word "Yucatan" comes from "Joktan" in the Old Testament. If you read Joktan in the Old Testament in the genealogy of the patriarch, there is a man who seems quite fit to have founded Yucatan. I don't believe this, but there are people who hold this quite true.

Only what I tried to do at this moment is to take you out of the short-lived

Greek dream, of your own poetical souls, and transplant you into the real world, which knows nothing of Homer and knows nothing of Virgil, because it's just poetical sham. Shampoo.

Forgive me. We all here, you see, are on the side of the Greeks by our daily doings. We are all Greeks, because we read books, we recite poetry, we enact poetry, we write poetry; and therefore, it is very tempting to play the Greek. And my whole life has been spent in trying to find the -- mid- -- med- -- medium, the compromise, the solution between my mind's deep interest in literature, and the demands of reality. And you are faced with this even more, because you are younger, and you are much more easily tempted by any pretty face. And therefore, poetry is a tremendous question mark at this moment.

And to show you now quite seriously what it has done to mankind in the last 50 years, I'll tell you that in 1894, when the Dreyfus case began in France, and thereby the pogroms of the Jews began, in -- in the mind of men; 1894 is a very important year for this reason, that the -- the general staff of France invented the accusation against the one Jew that was a member of their company and they wanted to get rid of him. In this year, a man who went to the same school as myself, and was always pa- -- held up to me as my great model, Professor Beloch, professor of ancient history at the University of Rome later, in Italy, wrote a short essay in which he stated that the Greeks never had anything to do with these damned Semites -- Semites--the Phoenicians, the Canaanites, the Hebrews--and that the island of Salamis and the cult of Adonis were strictly Greek.

Now the word "Salamis," as you know, means peace in Hebrew. And the word "Adonis" means -- "adonai" means Lord in Hebrew. And up to the year 1894, the innocents of mankind had believed that these were good imported words at the shore of Athens. Salamis is an island situated right in front of Athens. And if there is a an island Salamis, in which the great battle was fought, you see, against the Persians, then obviously there had been a time in which quite innocently people used Semitic terms for naming this locality.

"No," said Mr. Beloch -- Julius Beloch--I've known him myself; he went to the same school as myself, and he was an awful man. And he said, "Nothing doing. I declare," and he was believed, because he was a full professor in Germany, "that 'Adonis' and 'Salamis' are genuine Greek words. The Greeks have never had anything to do with the rest of the Mediterranean. They are purely IndoEuropeans."

The fun of the whole story is that Mr. Beloch himself was of Jewish descent.

It's an important date, however, because this short article of Mr. Beloch made epoch. And for the next 50 years, I assure you--I can prove it with all the literature there is--everybody repeated that the island of Salamis and the Adonis cult--every year that Adonis was -- died and rose again at the harvest festival--that this was purely Indo-European, Germanic inventions--or creations, of course--and that the wicked Semites had nothing to do with it.

This could happen in the full light of peace, in the full light of western civilization, in the full light of scientific progress. So be warned. In the name of scientific progress, there are as many crimes committed as by burning the witches. The 16th century in Spain was very cruel by burning people. But the 19th century was just as cruel, and is just as silly.

Don't think that any time, including the time of the present government in this country, is any more intelligent. It seems that government turns our heads. And Mr. Beloch wanted to rem- -- belong to the governing body of Germany. And this body of Germany had a tremendous interest of eliminating all contamination with any foreign influence. Practically, the influence was Russian or Polish. But theoretically, it had to be the Phoenicians. But that was just a mirror image of the zest of the nations of Europe to go on their own, you see, to -- to be absolutely independent, unimpregnated by any word of wisdom, if it didn't come from this side of the Rhine.

I've grown up under this, gentlemen. It was the doctrine which -- with which I -- they tried to vaccinate me, too. And this is quite serious. I didn't -- in my innocence of course at that time, I didn't know what was going on, that what this list which I have written up here to you, that is no play thing. That's great policy, high politics. You don't know that in our -- in our college halls here--I too, of course, am in the same boat--we are doing things. We are either destroying you for the future, or we are preparing you for the future. And I can assure you, in the last 50 years, we have been destroying you, because we have believed all this nonsense in many fields, in physics and philosophy.

Now philosophy itself, psychology--look at all these words--they come all from Greek poetry. The poets of Greece are not just people who write verse. But the poets of Greece are people who have created a second world, a phantom world, a world of subjects and objects, a world of what they call "theory." The very word "theory," of course is a Greek word which in no other real situation should exist. It's a very dangerous word. When you trap yourself on having a theory, be always willing to reject it, to dismiss it. It's just a theory. That's not very much.

I'm full of theories. I had splendid theories, gentlemen. Some were correct.

But the problem is that if you 50 theories, and 49 are correct, you can kill people with the 50th theory.

So beware of your own mind. Your head is the most obnoxious story. All sins are of the mind. Your body is innocent. Don't believe that your body sins. And your soul is redeemable. Because you can love and you can be loved. And love can cover a multitude of sins. But an unloved mind can hardly be redeemed. It's a useless thing. It's a very dangerous thing. It's redem- -- redeemed by its poetical output. It is true, I told you, that our literary men are sacrifices. The man himself who writes a poem is no good, but the poem may be very good. But there's no guarantee that he, the writer of the poem, thereby, you see, benefits at all.

Most artists are very unhappy creatures. And you must understand why that is inevitable. Before Greece came into this world to illuminate, and to enlighten, and entertain, and to compose, and to veil the true existence of man, his -- I told you that all tribes lived on sacrifice and great orgies, and that they tried to -- to pull into one: sacrifice, marriage, and initiation. In poetry in the -- of the last hundred years, you are told that if you read literature, and write literature, and subscribe to Look, that you can be educated, and can be a humanist even--without participating either in war, or death, or sacrifice, or in ecstasy of love. That LSD is just a -- a symptom, that you can try to replace real ecstasy by some such poor substitute. Formerly it was drunkenness; now it seems to be this drug. It will always be in any time very tempting to have a substitute for the true emotion. And ecs- -- ecstatic is very expensive, I mean. It costs at least some genuine pearl for your sweetheart, you see. Now in LSD, I suppose a genuine pearl is much more expensive? How is it? What's the relation of the price for LSD and a -- and bracelet?

So it is very tempting. You can always measure the -- the -- if something is cheaper, you try to buy -- that what has to be expensive at a cheaper rate. And in this sense, of course, it is very tempting, just as brandy is -- is better than wine, because you get drunk much faster. But the hangover is much more terrible.

Now you are surrounded by an existence which I would call, properly speaking, Greek. That is, the poets have nearly everywhere gone -- gained access to your daily existence. You read papers. You -- listen to the -- to this so-called--what is it called?--television? And -- and the television comes nearer to your body than -- than the -- the -- the somebodies whom you like. And friends, it's an incredible intrusion that the -- a foreign, nonexistent world comes to -- to -- in -- into your room, and you allow it in. This -- the interesting thing is that you allow it in.

This I al- -- always think fantastic. People you would hate to see -- shake hands with you, you see, they can smile at you and you smile back. Bought smiles. Well, that's mental whoredom of the greatest proportion. I mean, a woman that it -- can be bought is bad enough. But a mind of a man who can be bought for money to smile at you, like this man Pelvis, or Elvis, or --.

Why, this man is never himself. He never cries, even if he feels like crying. He always smiles. Isn't this despicable that we pay the highest salary in this country to people who make you laugh? That's today here the overlord of creation, the man who makes you laugh. And of whom you know that he himself has to go to the psychoanalyst because he wants to cry. Ask any psychoanalyst: who comes to him? The jokemak- -- the joker. They are in deep pessimism. And rightly so. And of course, simpler would be to spank them. There is no -- no reason to make you laugh. And I -- I pity anybody who turns on a -- a machine in order to -- to be humored. Are you mad? But this is the modern insanity, that you can overhear the sufferings of the people in Hanoi or in Saigon, by being made to laugh.

Your overdose of laughing is this Greek vice, the comedy of life. Life is not a comedy. It isn't a tragedy, either. But it's life. And it -- demands from you at every moment the proper response. And not a bought response, an arbitrary response, which you can simply line up, because something itches you to -- to get a good laugh. We cannot laugh always; we cannot cry always. But woe to the man who thinks he can direct his laughter and his woe according to his whim.

This would mean that when your mother dies, you cannot weep, because you have spent your weeping the day before, on television.

So I think that the last 50 years have shown already a frantic effort of the Greeks to remain in -- in government, to remain in power. This man, Mr. Julius Beloch, and all the other classical philologists, who tells you that the Greeks were absolutely independent, and Greek was unique, and had no infl- -- nothing else ever influenced them, obviously already had a very bad conscience. And don't think that Hitler or the anti-Semites of Germany are anything else but an outcropping of such an attempt to keep this mental world of "my own invention," "my own imagination" undisturbed.

"I can think as I please." This is the misunderstanding of the Enlightenment. We cannot think as we please. We have to weep and to laugh with those events which are meant to make us laugh and weep. We must participate. And therefore, this idea of a philosophy which is independent, of the Stoic whose -- looks at the world and laughs at the world is that which, of all the Greek heritage, I think has become untenable. Something has to be dismissed of this Greek

world.

But now I want first to -- today -- this has to be said in a way of warning you, that when we talk -- conjure up the old Greeks and their achievements, you must not be confused. The effect of the Renaissance on you and the greatness of Greece are two different things. If you know what the Greeks did and how they did it, you are most welcome to read Homer.

So let me break off now here my attempt to -- to show you that the -- the re-entrance into the Greek renaissance is not without its terrible price. You can say that the anti-Semitic destruction of 6 million -- Jews has very much to do with the Renaissance, because it was an attempt of all the Greeks, di- -- disguised as Greeks--whether they were Germans, or French, or wha- -- Poles, or -- to -- pose as pure nationalists. The national language, that's Greek.

And you see it from the very word "Salamis." This word -- beautiful word "peace," with which the pope, as you know, tried to greet the Jews in Jerusalem. When Paul VI went to Palestine, the only word he could pronounce in Hebrew was the word "Shalom," the word "peace." That's the same word as "Salamis." Now this one word, even, was already too Hebrew, too Semitic for the Greek tastes of the end of the 19th century.

How did it come about that the Greeks played this strange, separate role, that they were not just under the astrology of the priesthood of Egypt? Why didn't they celebrate 4666 like the Chinese in San Francisco? Why do you feel free from all these superstitions of astrology? The -- the Greeks had no horoscopes. They had no astrology. That's after all a very great achievement. And this negative achievement we should stress first, before you understand what Plato did, and Heraclitus, and Homer. They did strip Greece from its enslavement under one iron-clad sky world, one templar priesthood. They did not inscribe their temples with hieroglyphs. They had no professional priest to -- whom they obeyed. They had 250 islands which they peopled. And the Greek humanism is the -- the secret of being so close to your neighbor that you cannot overrate your own homeland.

This is the secret of Greece: the neighborhood of so many next-door citystates, you see, that with anything you say about your own government, you also have to include the next-door neighbor, you see. If you say, "We are a democracy, they are an aristocracy, the others are the Macedonians; they have a monarchy."

The Greeks always knew of a plurality of forms of life. The way of life of the poet is that he is not at home in any one order for good. But that he can look

at it from the inside as well as from the outside. And what we call "humanism" is exactly this faculty. And the first humanist therefore is Homer. Because Homer has taught mankind forever that the enemy is the enemy. But he also is your brother. That Hector is -- has to be slain, because he slew Patroclus; but that Patroclus must forgive Achilles, if he helps the father of Hector bury the son. That's mysterious, gentlemen, and that goes beyond human ordinary capacity. Most of you do not know that we already all have inherited this double-play, that we belong to two orders, you see. The small order of the law, where we must bear arms and be shot dead; and the second order in which the dead are on the other side, and we, are in the same boat, and go to the same Acharon, and the same nether world, the same Hades.

The Greeks -- were forced, because they had these 258 little colonies, and empires, and kingdoms, and cities, and what have you, to always weigh the evidence between my own order, my domestic principles, you see, "We at home do it this way," and to add, "but they do it differently; perhaps this is also right."

So the duplicity, the plurality, the inability to judge, that is the Greek discovery. And it has never left us. I told you that in Egypt, the triangle, the rectangular triangle -- -angle was called Isis, Osiris, and Horus. Which means that the triangle was sacred, and that there was no deviation. Any rectangular building had to be erected on these three deities. And nothing else. And all empires--Assyria, Babylonia, China, India, as well--have lived on the right angle on the sizing-up of the round earth. In front of the stars and the firmaments are we able to imitate the order of the sky by building right angles. You can hardly imagine how sacred the triangulation has been in antiquity. To be able to say, "This is a right angle" seemed to be the solution of the -- you see, the squaring of the circle. And it is.

And I -- I myself went to Egypt. Perhaps this illustrates it even simpler. In Egypt, and there is a village, El-Khab--E-l, hyphen, K-h-a-b--near Luxor, where the kings, the pharaonic graves of the second cycle, of the second solar year -- Great Year are found. El-Khab is older than the buildings of the pharaohs. It belongs to -- well, I think 5000 B.C. would not be an exaggeration. All the village, which has been excavated, has round huts. And as soon as the Egyptian pharaohs step in, everything is rectangular. It's a total break in architecture, you see. The great thing is the rectangle.

I only tried to tell you that to know how to triangulate and to erect a triangle was the triumph of the priests, because they imitated the sky, and the directions of the sun, you see, and the rising and the setting of the stars. And so what you think is a minor matter of geometry was of course a question of astrology, not of geometry, you see. It wasn't the earth that was measured, but the

stars that were envisaged.

Now with this example of El-Khab, I was able to understand that for the Greeks, this great triumph, to be able to have triangulation, was already pass‚, I mean. They took this over from the Gre- -- from the Egyptians. And that's why they could call the triangle "A. B, and C," with a completely valueless, you see, anonymous letter. Their problem was to live in cities with different calendars, with different astrology, different seasons. When it rained in Athens, you see, it didn't rain in Rhodos. And that changed everything in the constitution of the two cites.

Yet you had to go along, by living first in -- on the island of Rhodos, and then in Kos, and then in Salamis, and then in Sparta, and still feel identity and make yourself understood. So you had to purify, or to clean, or to filter your own language from all these cosmological items. And this cleansing process, gentlemen, by which people could get along in Sicily, as well as on the island of Rhodos, or Mytilene, or Salamis, is called "philosophy." What we call in Greece "a philosopher" is a man who is able to talk shop, business, reality--regardless of the city in which he just speaks, so that people can agree. They can agree on Priamus and Hector, you see, although one is a Trojan and the other is from Salamis, a Salaminian.

To you, this may -- be a small matter. But if you think of Ho Chi Minh and Mr. Johnson, I mean, not even Mrs. Johnson can talk turkey to Mr. Ho Chi Minh at this moment, because they haven't learned it. They have not learned to speak Greek together. Everybody is a partisan. I won't say who is a partisan in this country, because it's too cruel. Everybody has declared war, and therefore nobody can talk philosophically on peace. And that's very serious at this moment, and that's what we are suffering from. There is no philosophy between Ho Chi Minh and the American people.

So philosophy is not a luxury for the Greeks. They were so close to each other that they had to cultivate a way of speaking to each other on the main aims of life, regardless of the fact that their daily interests were opposite, you see. That they wanted to keep their slaves, they wanted to keep their land, they wanted to keep their property. They were of course just as blind and -- and patriotic as we are, you see. But they had to talk to each other, because their ships had to go from island to island. If you -- I didn't bring you a map, because I'm very clumsy in these matters. But I hope you all know how Greece looks. And the interest- -- most interesting fact about this look of Greece is that the Greeks themselves felt that they lived on islands, and therefore treated even this big part of the mainland, Peloponnesus, as though it was an island, you see. They preferred the hypothesis, you see, that everything was island, to our hypothesis that as long as

it isn't declared an island, it is mainland.

So the Greeks had the opposite--yes, you say "hypothesis," I suppose--the opposite presumption, I mean, assumption you see, that what is not island--"I have to be shown." You see, their Missouri was all island.

Now if you live on islands, then by establishment, the way from one island to the other island is more important--or to -- to other islands, in the plural--than the life on one island. The Greek religion, the Greek poetry, and the Greek Muses are the muses that accompany man on his travel from island to island. That's why the greatest island of Greece, Delos, is not inhabited. Only the god Apollo lives there, the god of migration. The god who sings to the poor boys and girls when they are alone, when the other sex is not present, when they are starved for love and affection. Apollo is the god of unrequited love. And his Muses sing, because there is nothing else to do. You can't drink even the salt water on the sea.

The tragedy or the -- the -- look how I'm wiped out there. Wiped off. Somebody is wiping me off. Wonderful.

This is very spectacular. What you call "Greek poetry" is the filling of inactive moments which are spent without the proper integration. To me, the greatest Greek poem--and I hope I will now -- you will now listen to me, so that I can dictate it to you--is -- are -- only a poem of four lines. It is composed by the poetess Sappho. The starvation of Gre- -- the Greeks, of course, extended to the women just as much as to the men. Starvation in the sense that half of their life was spent on board ship, you see: dirty, unshaven, you see, with very little food, and seasick.

Now they exaggerate to the other side, and you sing when you are -- you see, in order to combat your seasickness. This verse is -- by Sappho, is perhaps too simple for your taste. But to me it is the beginning of a new world of life, an interim world between the real acts of life. It simply says, "Deduc" -- let me say it in Greek first, because it's so very simple:

{ }.

Now on the island of Lesbos, Sappho was the leader of a boarding school of noble girls. And her poem simply says -- or -- pardon me:

"Dive down as the moon. The hour -- the Pleiades--the constellation of the Pleiades have set. The hours go by. It is midnight. And I sleep alone."

The courage to give to us an hour of nostalgia, of yearning, and -- and -- and proper place in life is unheard-of in a priestly or in a tribal order, you see. That is overlooked, the zero situation, or the minus situation. The Greeks have given expression, have given song and music to the suffering of a person who for one hour is -- has nowhere to go with her love, her energy, her expectations, her yearning. And that's great poetry.

And now you know what poetry is, that poetry is stepping into the lacunae of the ordinary, scheduled life of work, and play, and -- and -- and rest, and eating. It fills those times which, quite unforeseeable, appear all the time in everyone's life time and again. They have to stand patiently and wait.

And this awaiting, of course, begets in us tremendous powers of imagination, of foresight, of desire. And this little poem of Sappho I -- therefore I think is the -- is the quintessence of what we call the Greeks and their poetry. The -- "poetry" means to create. Now if anything is in creation, is that you can re- -- be made to repeat--you yawn, but I don't--a -- a verse, you see, which simply says, "The -- the moon has dived down; the constellation of the Pleiades has set; it's mid- -- the middle of night, and the time goes by. And I lie there single, in bed."

It is perhaps too simple for you. But I am full of admiration. I think nothing greater has ever been written, because any- -- everything else is just a circumscription of the reason why men write poetry. Because the timetable of nature, or the timetable of politics, or the timetable of the elections, or what have you--here, the schedule of this college--and your own life never, never are in harmony. We all have a minus or a surplus of time with regard to the external order of life, haven't we? It can't be helped, but that's our suffering. And it is also the birthplace of a revolt, the birthplace of an -- attempt to emphasize the amount of free time which you would like to pour into a new order of things.

So poetry -- takes advantage of your and my very mortal and very human disorder. All nature seems to us -- perhaps we are -- wrong, but it appears to us as absolutely strict. Things happen as they have to happen. Nothing ever pauses. Natural causes, natural effects. You would never say that a tempest waited so long, you see. Can't wait. It develops, and then it's there. By -- from natural causes and natural effects.

You and I, my dear, despite the Greek philosophy of nature, are unnatural beings. You may say we are supernatural, but one thing is certain: that your and my calendar and the calendar of nature have nothing to -- very little to do with each other. This poor woman Sappho, the head of the boarding school on Lesbos, was alone because the calendar of love and affection and the -- calendar

of the other girls and hers just didn't coincide. Now that's your problem just as much on a Sunday afternoon as it is anybody's problem.

And this is with some -- for some people it's with their whole life, that it is out of kilter, out of harmony with the rest of the world. And this is a terrible challenge. Like the Greek cities who were so many that none was in complete harmony with the other, and yet they had all to subsi- -- subsist together, you see, in some form or other. They couldn't burn each other all. In the same sense, you and I, my dear people, we have accidentally this nice time together from 11:00 to 12:00, you see. But then you go somewhere, and I go somewhere, and never again we meet.

This is the reason for humanism. The deepest reason of the existence of a -- a strange, in-between civilization, which the Greeks founded, between the real cities of man, and the real religions of Egypt, and Persia, and these great empires, who of course were much more affecting, and in a way much more needed --. The smallness of Greece is based on the fact that it is the filler of the lacunae. It is the -- the man who encourages you, the poet who encourages you to hold on to your own feeling in a situation in which as yet your voice has not made a dent.

Sappho is heard today. Many lovers have found consolation from her work, you see, and have been empowered to endure, to wait, to lie expectantly in their lonely -- on their lonely bier. But it had to be discovered. And I think therefore that the -- this little poem of Sappho is more suitable for you -- us -- for you to -- to appreciate what the Greeks did than if I quoted to you all the great tragedies and epics of Homer, and Aeschylus, and Euripides. They do, however--don't forget this--exactly this on a larger scale.

What the Greek tragedians in -- in -- did: they came 300 years after Homer--Homer lives, by and large, in 800, and the tragedians write their tragedies between 500 and 400 B.C.--repeat this, what I told you before. The great event in Greece is Homer, because he, on the largest possible scale, in the most important and most impossibly seeming occasion, writes the burial of the enemy by the enemy: Achilles agreeing that Hector should have an honorable tomb.

This is the content of The Iliad. Why is this so important? I myself have several times translated the sec- -- last two books of The Iliad into verse, because it always again and again gets me, the incredible greatness of the poem. In connection with Mr. Beloch's -- attempt to -- to destroy the -- Salamis and any relation of Greece to the eastern world, there is also to be -- has to be reported that between 1894 and 1930, the professor who had the chair of classics at the University of Berlin insisted that the reconciliation between Priam, Hector's father, and Achilles was not Homeric, was a forgery, was later.

So much did the Greek contribution, you see, disappear from the mind of nationalists who wanted power, who wanted a great Greece, a nation, you see, proud of itself, unforgiving. So they said, "Hector? That's a late invention."

You wouldn't believe it, but you must know if I am to teach you here, gentlemen, that the -- taking a course in any subject matter is dangerous. Don't think that you are here without peril of life. I can destroy your mind. And therefore I'm quite open and say, "I am dangerous." Because all speech is dangerous. It is not true that you can sit here and enjoy yourself, as the -- the saying goes. If you enjoy yourself, you are in great danger of being ruined. Thinking is just as dangerous as eating.

This is unheard in this country. Everybody thinks that thinking is painless, and without danger. It has terrible consequences, all the wrong ideas you have in your head. That's why all the poor Vietnamese are killed at this moment. One-half of our mind must be absolutely blood and idiotic that this can happen. And we are obviously. We are all given to the idea that thinking is without -- with impunity. It isn't.

And therefore, that this professor--who was also my teacher at the University of Berlin -- was a very dangerous man. He had attacked Nietzsche. They went to the same school, so he couldn't bear that. And he had attacked the greatest classical philosopher, and -- and the greatest historian of his time, and so. He also -- attacked poor Homer, and said Homer had not written the 24th book of The Iliad. Quite a remarkable achievement. But he wrote wonderful for the girl- -- ladies who went to the girls' high school in Berlin. And the empress always listened to his lectures. Because it seemed so painless, and so poetical, you see. And he just praised the Greeks, regardless of anything else.

If you have lived through such distortions of truth by skillful rhetorics, you are very suspicious of what you do yourself.

So it has been my attempt at -- in the building-up of these two lectures on Greece, to tell you that I am a servant, a member, a contemporary of a movement in which Greece was used to conjure up this poetical power of man to convince ourselves that it's worth living, and possible to live, although our personal life is disordered, is unfinished, and the life of the nations on this earth is unfinished, too. Because this of course reflects only your and my situation, that between the 132 members of the League of Nations, there is no peace, either. { }, as Sappho says, "I'm here alone, and the time goes on. and I'm just not integrated," you see. This is of course true of the whole world, if you read it properly. This poem is a great challenge. But you ought to know that to think is dynamite. And it is not allowed to -- simply to perorate on the Greeks without the penalty of plunging

the world into World War I, II, III, and IV.

And at this moment, the thing is not yet decided. Most of the doctrines handed over to you about the Greeks are -- have this innocuous character as though this was a luxury, something very nice. The Greeks are nothing nice. The Greeks are something indispensable. If you know that it is indispensable, you can ask what about them is indispensable. Not indispensable is eternal war. Not indispensable is their dis- -- contempt of womanhood. Not indispensable is their homosexuality. Not indispensable is their -- their indifference to -- servitude, to slavery.

And here I come now to the last expression, which shows why the Greeks are to us dangerous and important. What you are doing here, while you are sitting -- here in this room is that you are taking part in the liberal arts. You take it for granted that you are in a liberal arts college. And of course that's a creation of the Greeks. The word "liberal" comes from the Greek, {eloiteros}, worthy of a free man. To be paid for acting -- play-acting was not worthy of a free man, you see. That was a paid actor, like Mr. Reagan. But -- to act because you like it, as you do here on campus, that's liberal. The word "liberal" of course we have translated into Latin. But you must know that the Greeks were based on a class of slaves, based on a complete separation of men and women. Only the prostitutes could share the co- -- philosophical conversations of Mr. Plato and Socrates. And that "liberal" meant an isolation of the poetical faculty for the living room, or the drawing room. And I don't -- think it can carry on like that. The word "liberal arts" at this moment has lost its proper meaning, because we cannot distinguish between menial act- -- -tivities, you see--which are not liberal--and liberal arts.

The word "liberal"--we -- we'll -- I -- will come back to this again next time--therefore is the key to our crisis today in education, our crisis in philosophy, our crisis in politics. The word "liberal" limits you in your thinking to being an imitator of the genuine, the old Greeks. We have today to outstep, to outgrow the limitations of the Greek renaissance--or Roman renaissance--or we are lost. Or we'll plunge the whole world into eternal war. It's very serious. Much more serious than you can perhaps at this moment comprehend.

Here we have this wonderful university, which is itself an outgrowth of the liberal arts of Greece. But we can't go on in forgetting that we have nothing to do with the -- the Greeks' -- their -- the Greeks' way of life. We have inherited from the Greeks the neighborhood. We have inherited the narrowness of 258 republics who have to know of each other. But we cannot inherit with them -- from them the glory that you have to die for your country. That is the only solution we have, to make peace. The Greeks never tried. Never did, and preferred to be swallowed up by the Roman Empire before ever coming to terms with each

other. The inability of creating peace is one of the lasting handicaps of the Greeks. And therefore, don't say that the reception -- the re-reception of the Renaissance is good enough for you.

At this point, I -- I stop, because I have been reminded that I have a duty. Of course, being a Greek, I don't want to fulfill my duty, ever. Greeks play. But this is in my own interest, and therefore I will do it.

I asked you to write a paper on the Isaiah, and I -- here am asked to say more about it. Now I -- I don't want to say too much, because you have to write the paper. But what I have asked you to do is something rather strange. Among all the commentary, and all the ink spilled, on the Bible, there is a remarkable gap. The second part of Isaiah, called the Second Isaiah, the chapters 40 to 66 are a riddle. Nobody knows who has written them; nobody knows why they were written. Nobody knows how they ever got -- went -- got into the canon. It is highly improbable to -- to believe that they ever were received legitimately, because there was nobody in authority, no rabbi that -- who could say this writing is so wonderful that it has to be -- part of the Bible. On the other hand, it was in the Bible for 450 years before John the Baptist and Jesus were hit and said, "That's it! We have been waiting for this. That's we." They -- He said it, and omitted 450 years of other writings and said, "I'm only interested in the Second Isaiah," and died for this, with the quotes from Isaiah on his lips. Now that's quite exciting.

Here -- and this is why I invite you to write. Gentlemen, you read newspapers; you listen to the radio. Now don't think that you listen to anything real when you listen to this stuff. Anything that's just of the moment is too bad for you -- it's too cheap for you. You should read things that are still true 50 years from now. Why do you read anything else? I think it's scandalous how you feed yourself with absolutely worthless {stubble}, as of the moment. That's no nourishment.

The Second Isaiah had the courage--and that's why we have to talk about the prophets the next time--had to se- -- say something which was not understood or read for 450 years. And then it became the pivot and the turning point of world history. That's something, you see. That's as good as inventing an airplane, because it made people soar above the dead. Just what we do now physically in flying, this was done mentally. He reached the next period of history. And you and I live on his -- at his mercy. Without the Second Isaiah, not one institution of the state of California would exist; certainly not the separation of state and Church.

And this is why I ask you to write on it, and also because it gives me great

pleasure to find that all the experts have neglected it, and never looked into it, because it's obviously too difficult for them; because they all are today following the Greek method of explaining and interpreting, you see, the footnotes of the footnotes of the footnotes. There is no footnote in Second Isaiah. It's a great text. Nothing else. You can read it with the same expert knowledge as the greatest theologian today. And -- I won't say more.

And -- there, that's why I have to say -- you -- you. Who asked me? Who wanted to have an explanation? Somebody gave me this paper. You. Are you satisfied?

So I'm sorry to say, I cannot write the commentary. You can write just as good a commentary as the leading theologian in Basel University. And this is very strange, that by the grace of God, at the moment when the Greek reception is at an end, that there should be in the Old Testament a writing which is absolutely virginal, virgin ground, virgin territory, unexplained, perhaps inexplicable, but certainly a warning not to waste your life on days of the present --. Don't do that. If you have nothing in your head or your heart which will still be true 500 years from now, you don't deserve to go to a liberal arts college. Because the great secret of the liberal arts college at the last 500 years in the western world has been that although as a -- its text it had the Greeks, the Greek literature; as its walls, as its health, as its mainspring, it had the writings of St. Paul.

Thank you.