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...like this.

There are two things today which I would like to bring into your consciousness. One are the -- is this plurality of our modern calendars. And the second is an even deeper consideration of the meaning of the holiday as the creator of our yardstick for what we call "time." The second point, of course, is more -- the more difficult one. I leave it then for -- as the -- for the second part of our class today. The third thing is easily understood -- more easily understood, because we are exposed to this plurality of calendars, in our own life here in this college, even.

We said the one is the calendar of the natural processes. And it has as one important feature, that the calendar of nature is incessant. It is -- there is not letup. Just the sun and the moon--please consider this for a moment--and the earth are turning incessantly. This calendar then is one of a juggernaut, of a maelstrom, and no human being can stand it. We -- you and I have to sleep; we have to rest; we have to go on a vacation. But the calendar of nature--as the modern physics considers nature, and as modern industry considers it--is of incessant operations.

The only situation in which man, before the 19th century, approached this state of nature, was in war, when we put out watches, because a part of the army had to be -- stay awake. And only the others could go to sleep under their protection. The enemy could come any minute. And the surprise attack in war has been now extended to the movement of electricity, of the water that runs down Niagara Falls. It would be a poor power plant that would shut down while -- 12 hours of the night, the water is running down Niagara Falls. There has to be somebody who takes advantage of this water. You take it for granted. But it means, gentlemen, that we ap- -- comply with the calendar of 365 and-a-quarter day- -- or to be quite exact: 365 days, 5 hours, 46 minutes, and 48 seconds.

This irregularity has played a great part in the history of the human race. Our calendar is not determined by days, but by this -- strange circles of 5 hours and a few minutes. And that's why I mention it; it's quite important. Much confusion even today is engendered by this strange fact that God did not want us to believe that He is limited by these niceties of a regular calendar.

As you know, the chambers of commerces -- commerce today would love to have an eternal calendar in which we would know for the next hundred years ahead when Easter and the Sundays fall. I think it would be the end of life if we

would, so to speak, suspend our connection with this genuine calendar of nature, which we have just to learn about by observation, by obedience. -- If you become a junior executive, you will all one day be preoccupied, and -- invited to deal in petitions by the chambers of commerce to the pope or to the president, that they should abolish the existing irregular calendar in which the Easter is -- falls upon a different day every year, fortunately. And people think in this country that's absurd; it's a great waste of money. And they want to have a master calendar of regularity. But this incessant calendar of nature is irregular. It defies human measurements. Even in this very external thing, that the real year by which the sun reaches the same place in our sky, you see, after a certain revolution, is not to be fixed by the measurements which we use, by the 24-hour day. I think that's very im- -- significant.

Incessant movement of a type which defies human arithmetic, or human computation in a way. We cannot force it under our little mental -- little mind. It is --.

The second calendar is -- in -- as you find it described in "Time-bettering Days" at great length, is your and my college calendar, the calendar of leisure, the calendar of the Greek mind in which the serious business of making money for the next college year is placed into the vacation time; and leisure, meditation, contemplation is the -- what -- order of the day for the eight or nine months here in Dartmouth. It is such a difficult calendar that most of you don't make use of it, because half of the time, you are out on a spree. It is too more -- much, I think, for most young men to believe in this college calendar. Because it's a Greek calendar, it means that it is a calendar for leisure. And leisure, as any holiday, you see, is a thing only to be enjoyed in small doses. And four years of leisure therefore go down the drain with most of you.

What do you put into the calendar instead? Party, work. You work at Christmas vacation perhaps for the Post Office. Or you wake -- work here as work- -- workers. That would be the opposite calendar of eternal work, of nature's operations. And you may use the word "operative" to show you that -- nature operates, and we operate. That is, we do work, and nature does work. Because "opus, opera" means really to do work, you see, to achieve something. If so many tons of water flow down the Niagara, that's operation. That's the work that is achieved. And our whole industry tries to imitate nature's work.

Since labor today is not taken so seriously as a cosmic element, an element of the cosmic life, I -- think it is pertinent for you and me to bring back to your ken that where we work under scientific and technical standards of modern production, we try to operate as parts of nature. And therefore, what we call "work" or "labor," or "engineering," or "invention," "processes of production," are

all attempts to enter the constant process of the work, you see. And the world is in operation. And we are, too.

And -- I don't know if I hit it off right. The word "operation" is not dogmatic with me at all. But I think the word "to operate" and "to proceed"--the word "process" and the word "operate" are -- come nearest to making you perhaps, for one moment, pause and see that when we work--we enter into the calendar of natural operations, that we dare to put our hand into this maelstrom, and are -- going along with it, carried away by it. Once you have a -- seen a turbine operate, you must get the feeling that it is man who dares to enter upon these natural processes, you see, certainly by -- by repea- -- making them repetitive, and by organizing them, but also in such a way that we are forced to go into nature, and become, in a way, part of it. All our lature -- labor takes us out of our own anarchical and arbitrary will and whim, gentlemen. The work just has to be done in this fashion to be done rightly. And it is objectively so. And it is -- modern work is the ideal of what you always seem to claim to enjoy, and to en- -- to vie for. It is objective. Nature's calendar is the most objective calendar in the world. And the college calendar is the most subjective calendar in the world.

The -- there was one single word in the report of Vanraalte with which I would like to take issue. That was his use of the word "mind," where it wasn't quite correct. It was "soul." That's not the same thing, you see. You understa- -- you remember?

(I don't know why, but I know I used it. I don't know why { }.)

Because the human mind is not that part of our anatomy which weeps and laughs. You see, the mind is -- lives in a much more steady way, you see, by its thoughts which have neither joy nor sorrow in themselves, you see. { } emotions come from up here. And that's how you used it; you said the mind should go through these emotions.

That's why leisure and the academic year do not began -- beget real holidays, gentlemen. They beget days off; they beget days where we don't work. They beget time for enjoying life, for having a hobby, for having avocation, for reading a good book. But the essence of the mind is, gentlemen, that it doesn't draw people together, but it makes them -- everybody sit apart, just as here at this moment, where I appeal to your mind--as I do with any lecture--every mind of -- your -- operates independently and everybody tries to get as much out of it as he can, because your mind is by itself not able to create a common experience really, you see.

So the academic calendar creates the absence of work, and allows your

subject to have your own joys, and your own worries, and your own judgments, and your own tastes, specially. And so it individualizes. Where you have a subjective calendar, you will immediately understand that the essence of education is that: "Everyone to himself," you see. Everybody is trying to get -- form -- his own self out of this impact, this con- -- -frontation with the humanities, with the goods and beauties which we can only realize while we have time, while we are not operating seriously and objectively, while we -- are allowed to follow our own whims and take them very seriously.

There are two other calendars, however. And they are all the more interesting, I think, because they are very sick. I think the college calendar and the work calendar, it might be said, operate to perfection in this country.

I have tried to -- to use an example in the "Time-bettering Days" about their perfect functioning by telling of a meeting of Episcopalian priests in this state of Vermont who of course -- as a matter of course follow the academic year in their meetings as a group, all -- from all over the state. They have the so-called "clericus" once a month, and from June to September, there is no clericus. Why are there no clericus? Certainly that has nothing to do with the ecclesiastical year; it has nothing to do with high church clergymen--which many of them are in this Episcopal Church--who have their church calendar, you see. And the church calendar goes from December 1st to November 30th, as you may not know. And it begins with Advent, you see, and the last day of the Church year is the Day of St. Andrews. And they don't give a damn in their meetings to this calendar. They respect the calendar of the colleges of education of the Greek -- humanities today, of the liberal arts college tradition, and they stop to meet in June, and they begin to meet in September, where you can clearly see that even good clergmen -- clergymen and churchmen do not know what power the college calendar already had gained over their behavior, you see. And of course the fact that their clericus lapses in June and convenes again in September is a much more formative element of their life-rhythm, you see, than all their subjective dogmas about the importance of the church calendar, you see, and about the -- the theories they have about their being devout Episcopalians.

So most Roman Catholics in this country are good liberals, because they also live by the church calendar not at all. They live by the college calendar or by the work calendar. That's a very important fact. You must know: your timetable is your faith, is your enactment of faith, is your religion, what you really do, from day to day. And not what you believe that you should do, that you -- that you, so to speak, idealistically in your thoughts, treasure. That doesn't count.

Well, that's just one example. In my Multiformity of Man, I gave the opposite example of the superintendent of the -- subway in Boston who never

took a vacation, who tried to -- who worked actually 365 days a year. And this is of course a pure, pure example of 19th-century worship of work. And work has been worshiped. You -- the Church even succumbed--just as the clericus of the Episcopal Church has succumbed to the college calendar, so you may say that a whole generation of ministers has -- had succumbed to the so- -- social gospel. And they would measure the religion of a minister by the amount of work he was doing.

And you still find these unfortunate ministers all over this country who have a calendar just packed with dates in advance, and who have planned their work for the next year, just as they were robots, because that is work. That's nature, you see. And the social gospel, therefore, is a typical way of explaining the victory of the workman's operating calendar in this country. And I would think again that you still have many -- probably in your own family--perhaps your father belongs to these people whose only way of worshiping God is by incessant work. They can't stop.

And again, it doesn't matter whether such an individual then says he is a confessing Christian, or whether he steals an hour to go to church on a Sunday, it -- the calendar of work has conquered him. And even when he tries to have a day off, he's still doing something. And he wants to be operated. He goes hunting -- quail-hunting or -- or fishing in Canada. But it has to be on time, on a schedule. You can even operate, you know, your pleasures, and treat them as work. And most people who go to Europe always seems to -- seem to me under a terrible strain of -- of production. It's a deadline they always have to meet. Where you have to meet a deadline, you are under this incessant death of nature.

The word "deadline" is a very good word to study the fact that man is in -- com- - imprisoned -- in prison -- in the prison of this Niagara, this juggernaut of an operating nature. Nature kills all the time, and has all the time deadlines. So if you get a poet who has a contract with a publisher to meet a deadline, he has ceased to be a poet. He is just nothing but a -- an automaton for the output of ma- -- commodities. He has sold his soul to the devil. Most people -- most writers in this country have. That's why their books are so very poor.

Anybody who meets a deadline has ceased to be a creative person, because gentlemen, the third calendar--the calendar of creation--cannot be predicted. It is utterly impossible to predict when Goethe would finish his Faust or when Wagner would finish Tristan and Isolde, you see. If he can, it is not a great piece of art, you may be sure.

It is the opposite. You find great men who die when they can lay down their pen, and their work is finished, as it was with Dante. He died after the 33rd

canto of the "Paradise" and the hundredth canto of The Divine Comedy had been written. So his life followed his work, because it was purely creative. That's a great man. Nobody understands this in this country, because you meet deadlines.

Nothing that needs a deadline can be creative, gentlemen, because deadlines interfere with the secret of creative time. The arts are free from repetition. If they are anything, they are original. And any original creation has its own time. You cannot predict how long it does take you to write a poem. It may take you a second, and it may -- take 10 years. It makes no difference. It is -- a poem that takes 10 years is in no way better than a poem that takes one second, you see. But the poem that takes one second also is no better than the poem that takes one -- 10 years.

Every living organism has its own biological time. Even the biologists have now recognized this. There's a man in France -- does anybody know the book, Biological Time? Who is studying -- { } is he here? No. Who is studying natural sciences, or becoming -- going to be a doctor? Well, have you never heard of "biological time"? High time that you do.

Biological time is not natural time, gentlemen. Biological time, for example, says that at 70, we live a different time rhythm than at 20. A wound takes longer to heal, and so on. -- This is -- the Count {de Nuit} who has written this book on biological time. He's dead already. But it's a very interesting -- the idea that every living organism has its own time.

Now we become a glimpse of this creative calendar which points into the -- process of becoming--of not of creation, of creation still going on--when you look into the political field, not only in the artistic field.

There was an article -- editorial in a paper the other day about the third crisis of the United Nations in one year. It doesn't matter what it was. It's always a crisis. But the important thing about the article was that he took it for granted that we should rejoice in their being crises. We should not be fed up and said, "{After another} crisis -- the regularity of time is interrupted."

But he said, "Only these crises make us realize that maybe there is a new international order. Obviously it can only come to pass in terrible travail. We must not shrug our shoulders and say, 'Politics!' But we must rejoice and undergo the great expectation, and the lamentation, and the trembling in order to have this power to see in the crisis the real process of life. The real process of something becoming. If we would think the United Nations should -- function, we would treat it as though we were there producing aluminum, or sheet-metal."

Now sometimes I think they do not even produce sheet-metal. They only produce paper. But this article warned me against my prejudice against the United Nations, which is very strong, and said, "Watch out. There may be a world in travail. And because of the crisis, this is so."

The highest moment, gentlemen, of political birth, of political becoming, of the irregularity of life in the future--instead of repetition of the work of nature that goes on repetitively, by gravity--the greatest event, of course, is a war. When you here live in leisure in this college, and when you have lined up a job with Coca-Cola for the next year, you are living in the two calendars of subjectivity and of objectivity. And there is suddenly an alarm, and you are asked to enter the service of the United States Navy, because a war is on. That happened twice, as you know -- three times, as a matter of fact--1950, 1942, and in 1917--to your predecessors at Dartmouth College. Most responded to the call immediately. They didn't even wait for the official order of { } day of mobilization. They went before, voluntarily. My own assistant here left me in the lurch in February of 1942, and enlisted as a -- as a -- airman.

He was right, because this is -- politics are the calendar by -- of events. And we celebrate it, for example, tomorrow, on Lincoln's Birthday. And we celebrate it--and now you c- -- I come to the sickness of the political calendar of the United States--by certain days which have not come off.

The war, I said, is a -- is a -- an event which suddenly breaks into the subjective calendar of your studies, and your artistic enjoyments, and the objective calendar of production, and moneymaking. What is this third calendar? I call it "political"; I call it "creative," because it reshapes the future; it has to do with the destiny of history. States crumble. Frontiers are changed, and man is not the same after he returns from the war. The United States, after 1865, meant a different s- -- United States than before 1860 and Fort Sumter.

But as you know, we have not succeeded--it's very strange--in the United States, to transmit the acquired qualities either of the Civil War, or of the First World War, or of the Second World War. In the senate of Georgia, there was passed an amendment--perhaps you saw it--a bill by which the 14th and 15th Amendment of the United States Constitution were declared void. That happened two days ago -- five days ago. You haven't even noticed it. But it is such an effrontery that it shows that these people feel that the Civil War has not happened--or shouldn't have happened--and can be abolished. They say that -- the 14th Amendment, the -- the seven states of the South hadn't voted, and therefore, that they didn't represent -- that the bill did not meet the constitutional requirements of the Constitution.

Now the terrible thing is not that such infamous -- infamy can be perpetrated in such a state, but that the -- they get away with murder, that they can laugh, that they can hold up the Constitution of the United States openly and publicly--as the elected representatives of the state of the Union--to ridicule. I don't know how long the -- this country can stand this, gentlemen. In Mississippi, murder is not persecuted and punished. And in Georgia, they abolish a part of the Constitution of the American -- people by a solemn vote taken officially in the senate. Not a -- not a Streu vote -- and a straw vote, and not a mockery, but by serious procedure. It's enacted, and the clerk in the minutes of the meeting has to read it.

So the United States are in very feeble circumstances with regard to their political calendar, because the only day by which the Civil War is remembered is a very ambiguous day. It's a day for the dead, and not for the freedom of mankind. It's Memorial Day. Memorial Day is the only way in which the Civil War has been -- reached, so to speak, modern man, you see. And it is quite left in the open -- what is remembered? The dead, you see; the victory; the effect of the victory? It's ambiguous. The South, as you may know, have a different Memorial Day for their dead. And so it's still just a war between the states. The one remember their dead, and the others remember their dead. And it's stalemate.

Now that's very serious, gentlemen. The United States of America have unlearned, since 1845, ever to make peace. There has been no peace in 1845, there has been no peace in 18- -- 1917 -- -19. There has been no peace for the United States and the rest of the world in 1945. You are im- -- unable to conclude peace. Unconditional surrender in '45, and unconditional cowardice in 1957. That's no -- no urging, no harvest of the -- no fruit of the victory.

This is -- comes to a clear representation, gentlemen. Where there is sickness, there is of course an abscess. And the abscess is Armistice Day. You have a day in the calendar which is called Armistice Day, which is celebrated on November 11th, half-heartedly, a little ashamedly. Lectures do not stop, as you know, on that day. But it is still observed by some part of the college. Was it observed this last year?

(No.)

(In Great Issues they stop, and have a prayer for five minutes.)

Quite. That's exactly { } the amount of Armistice Day.

Now gentlemen, Armistice Day is a remarkable day, because it confesses that it is just an armistice which is celebrated, and not a peace. Can you see that

-- that is very eloquent? And it is only the armistice of the First World War which is celebrated; whereas May 5th, and May 6th, and August 11th of the Jap- -- D- -- day of the Japanese and the German armistice have got no recognition in this country to speak of. They are unpopular. They are overlooked. They are mentioned in the papers, but nobody does anything about it.

So gentlemen, we have the very stubborn fact--and I think it is very important for you, gentlemen, if you want to bring up your children at all in some fear of the Lord--of the future. Because God is -- is not the Lord if He isn't the Lord of your future, and of your grandchildren. If He should be, gentlemen, it is very difficult for you to convey to your grandchildren that ever somebody in this country has done anything for the future, because there are no days in which this shines. The -- these three great events--the Civil War, the First World War, and the Second War, and its corollar- -- I mean, its annex, this terrible Korean War, which was really very hard on the men who had to fight it--have no memory, have -- are not handing over to you the consciousness that we live in one world in which all men are members, constitutional members of the human race. If we had this -- three days in full flower, I think most of our problems would already be solved. Because in the Civil War, we acknowledged, you see, that any part of the globe has to have a constitution which recognizes the humanity of all men, you see. So locally, you see, a universal law. And in the world war, obviously, it's the reverse order, you see. All over the globe, this law of the local -- locality, since we know the minimum of human rights which in such a locality must prevail. If we had a globe, gentlemen, ruled by one power, or by one United Nations, or by one big -- big boss, or even by two big bosses, in Moscow and in Washington, and we didn't have the yardstick how they should be governed, it would be the most miserable state of -- of mankind. Because obviously you could have a world government which many spinsters aspire to, and it would be the greatest horror, the greatest hell on earth. War might be abolished, but everybody would be enslaved, you see. The -- what's then the good of a -- such a general peace, if you have no qualification of what this peace must mean in every -- on every part of the globe?

Therefore, the Civil War and the world wars are two sides of the same coin. They are totally neglected, however, both. We have not executed the conditions of the Civil War. We have not emancipated the Negro in the South. We haven't given them land. We {haven't} done anything for him. And there are no rich Negroes in this country. As long as there are not -- there do not -- there are not some Negroes who belong to the richest people in America, the Civil War has been fought in vain. And they are prevented from becoming rich, by very simple methods.

And that's the issue, not school segregation. You don't want to { } the

Negro rich. He must be put in his place. That's the really great problem of America, the economic equality of the Negro. And that hasn't been executed. Therefore, it would be horrid if the -- if the Constitution of the United States would become worldwide, because it would only show what you can write on paper and what can -- you can do in practice. It would be a hypocritical constitution.

That's why we still have no world order. It isn't possible, yet. You have to have one thing and the other. You have to have on -- in one part of a globe a good order, you see, which -- where -- which really says what it means, and means what it says. And then you have to carry that over to the rest of the globe. And that could be embodied, I think--since we have done something for the two purposes--if we had had the stamina to stick with the peace, as we have stick -- stuck out the war.

As you know, in Valley Forge, in -- after the Battle of Manassas, Bull Run, et cetera, things looked pretty dark in Washington. And then people had the stamina to carry on, and to stay -- stick it out till the war was won. But after that, total collapse. It seems that this country has no courage in peacetime. It has only courage in wartime. Very strange. You see it today. It's just panic among the -- no, I won't say any more.

And the reason, however, is, I think, that nobody is impregnated and impressed in peacetime with some living re-acquisition, re-conquest of the spirit of these wars. They are left in the popular textbooks. That's a Greek way, just on a -- in a library, you see. That's not a way of re-acquiring the spirit of Gettysburg. And for the Civil War, you may say that the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address have made up a little bit for the lack of a holiday. But you all know how these addresses have reached you. And I doubt that you would say that it is enough as a schoolboy to learn them once. Because anything that a schoolboy touches becomes play. It isn't serious enough. And the world wars have not reached you at all. There's no hero. There's no tradition. And there is no meaning. It's perfectly meaningless. The First World War has -- been debunked in the '20s and '30s in this country as though it never should have happened. And the prophets like Woodrow Wilson and Bill Mitchell have been -- have been ostracized in their own lifetime.

It is very interesting, gentlemen. Mr. Woodrow Wilson was on the mind of President Roosevelt every day. And he was not allowed, as president of the United States, ever to mention him, because it would have wrecked his presidency. He had been, as you know, assistant secretary of the navy, under Roosevelt. He knew that Roosevel- -- Wilson had been right. He knew that Wilson on his deathbed had appealed to the students of this country--to you people, people

exactly like you, and you are exactly in the same position, by the way--and said, "If you do not act, there will be a slaughter of humanity in 20 years, which -- against which the First World War would -- will be like nothing. But you won't hear. Listen to me. You can still -- stave off this great disaster, this destruction of Europe." And so he died. In 1923 he made this speech. And it was addressed to people just as -- well, like you.

And -- and of course, they did the same as you -- did this very moment. They laughed, and went home, and let him die in despair.

And gentlemen, the way in which a holiday can save time therefore is very important for the political calendar. An act rightly remembered can save a war -- stave off a war. If Woodrow Wilson had met with students who had not laughed at the occasion, but had done something about it, it was utterly unnecessary that all the cities of Europe were -- had to be bombed out of existence, and that the Russians would now be in the -- in the places where Goethe and Schiller lived, in the heart of Germany, and where Martin Luther preached the Reformation. It's a joke that the Russians should meet in the place where -- where Mar- -- Luther translated the Bible.

Have you ever thought what that means? And why that is so? Because the United States only will do something when it is 20 years too late. It is the same today. What should have been done in 1945 is not even done now. And it will wait to -- until the next election. "It cannot be done, because there is an election, so we can't act." And you laugh, and you say, "It can't be done, because there is an election." Gentlemen, as long as this country will say, "There is an election, and -- therefore we can't do anything," it will mean, gentlemen, that the doctrines, the experiences, the sufferings of a political event cannot be harvested, cannot be stored, cannot be re- -- wri- -- cannot be gained, and ingrained in the body politic. That's why we have no peace.

We have the interesting fact, gentlemen, that the United States, since 1917, have not been able to make peace with the rest of the world. You call this now with a very -- surprise, "Look, the Cold War." But of whose making is it? Only and exclusively of the making of the United States people, who have so many elections that they can never elect to make peace. For two years, in advance of the election, Washington -- cannot make a decision, and then one year after the elections, they are so excited in Washington with appointments and patronage, that they can't make a decision, either. So it's always only three-quarters of a year or one year, in a period of four years in which you can talk politics in Washington.

That is, the safe -- salvation of this country, of the world is utterly unim-

portant compared to the niceties of the political game. This is a -- and you always laugh because the Romans spent all their time on circuses, or the Spaniards on bullfights. Gentlemen, I don't think that our politicians are as good as bulls. They're just oxen. The -- the games are too small. They are not really bloodthirsty. They are not real -- real bulls, heroes. Very, very tame, aren't they?

And the -- for this you sacrifice everything. Simple is baseball, and football, and what-not, basketball. That's the important -- in this country. But the absence of peace is total. This country has no peace with any power, not even with Saudi Arabia. Let alone with Israel. Let alone with Egypt. Let alone with Germany. Let alone with England. Let alone with France. We are not -- peace with any other nation, because we can't conclude peace. And con- -- to conclude peace, gentlemen, is a serious event, because it means the readiness to remember. Now you will admit that one of our least-developed faculties is the faculty to remember anything political, you see. The great zest is to forget. And to the -- rush on to the next event.

You know why Mr. Truman is a great president, despite his smallness? Because he read as a -- I told you this story already, didn't I? -- I -- he read as a boy an historical story of the Civil War, about how -- Lincoln deposed McClellan. And since he was in his formative age, and he couldn't play football because he had poor eyesight, he learned something with the eagerness of youth, with the zest of youth, of the importance of such an historical event. And when it came to the decision whether Mr. Truman was president or Mr. MacArthur, he deposed MacArthur in remembering McClellan, and that this saved the Union.

And I think--I'm not discussing now the issue of -- of merit--but that such a man is still among us, who can learn from history, is a great comfort to me. Because -- the president to -- whom we have, cannot. He knows no history. He has never read in his youth with eagerness and zest the history of the Civil War. He doesn't claim to. That's the difference, gentlemen. His complete lack of continuity in the great emotional experiences of the race. It takes emotion, it takes excitement, it takes worry, it takes tears and laughter to be at one with Abraham Lincoln, and with the Gettysburg Address, and with the firing of McClellan, you see, and with the { } -- you know what Lincoln said of -- of -- of Grant, when they told him that he was a drunkard? And he was a drunkard. You know what he said? Wie?

("{ }. He fights. He's a drunkard, but he fights"?)

No. "I wish that all my other generals were drunkards, too." Because -- jokingly, you see. Because the results show.

Well, what I mean by -- even by this example, gentlemen, was -- erect new standards. That is, only when man -- we are driven to the extremes, do we know who is great and who is small. In peacetime, under the work cal- -- -man's calendar, and under the leisure calendar of the college, neither you nor I know who is a brave man and who is a coward. All the cowards there masquerade as -- as honest men. There is no opening, no revelation of the truth among us, in peace- -- in these subjective and objective calendars. And therefore, gentlemen, I must wake you up -- shock you into the realization that if we had only the workman's calendar, we would abide by the lowest faculties of the human race, the power to work and to be honest, not to steal. That's very little, gentlemen. That's the minimum, I mean, that's not -- enough.

The citizens' calendar--of which I am -- have been talking here now--the citizens' calendar is the calendar of the acts by which a community is founded. It's the act -- the calendar of founding communities, gentlemen. In a -- remembrance of armistice, we wake up from the fear that we might be defeated. And that would be -- dissolution of the Union. That's what it would mean. And the people who have refounded the Union deserve our memory, because we can study in General Patton and in General Grant the real qualities of a savior of the Union. Mr. Patton slapped a soldier in the face, and all the papers in America were full of this incident. But that he won the war, that was very soon less important to these newsmongers here.

You have perhaps forgotten the whole incident of General Patton's. But that's very mi- -- a very minor matter whether he slapped the soldier or not, you see. It's absolutely second-rate. This is not important. But in this -- in the peacetime calendar, somebody who slaps another person is just ostracized.

Now gentlemen, if you don't have a general who can slap a soldier, you see, then you can't win a war. By your moral standards, you cannot win a war, because you want to live always with the behavior of a schoolboy. The first thing he's told, that he cannot slap another man in the face. And the same with -- drunkenness, gentlemen. Drunkenness is certainly a vice. It destroys family life. It is terrible. I won't -- don't want to -- to -- but it is a very minor matter co- -- when it comes to the great issues of a nation, you see. Then you have to put up with the drunkard, if he is a genius. That's very hard for you to understand.

And I wish to formulate it in this way, gentlemen. What's right and beautiful according to one calendar is useless and horrid according to the rules of another calendar. Your calendars have absolutely different standards for humanity. What is true in the calendar of the college is a smooth-going, happy-go-lucky kindness to each other, you see, so that everyth- -- everybody smiles at everybody else--or grins, I should say--and never says it -- what he really thinks of the

other lousy fellow. Never tell the truth on campus, and you will be elected to the secret society.

We had a secretary of the -- of the war, gentlemen, of -- that was -- his name was Stevens. And he went to Yale College. And they asked him how he had made his career, you know, {his man} and so on.

And he said, "Oh, very simple. When I went to Yale, I said to myself, that I would keep my mouth shut on any important issue for the first three years. And -- and so I became a member of Teeth and Bones."

That's the college calendar, gentlemen. That's the negative calendar, of never to shine, and never to become conspicuous, and never to be- -- have a -- be controversial. Now Mr. Patton and Mr. Grant were highly controversial, you see. That's why they could be successful generals. And as long as you want to have a noncontroversial figure -- people in politics, you can't have politics, you see. You can have daddies, but you can't have politics. We have { }.

In politics, you need the people who have -- who grow hair on their teeth, who are hard-boiled, and are very -- very -- very brusque and brutal, because it takes courage, you see, to save a -- nation from disaster. And a courageous man is not soft-spoken, and kind, and -- and -- and in for charities, and church-going, and so on. That's a very minor matter with him. He may be a drunkard, but he wins the battle.

Now that's very { } with your coat of arms. You want to have one code of ethics. The great thing about the variety of calendars seems to me is this: that we learn that there are different sides to man. And that a nation is not saved by the people who in their own time shine by virtue, and kindness, and am- -- amiability, and graceful manners.

The man about town is the last person who can be used for the saving of a nation, you see, or the man who came to dinner. Isn't that obvious? Because he is an entertainer, an entertaining person. And entertaining people, gentlemen, are not people who can re-create the times. In college, you want to have entertainment. As -- as much as you want it, you can have it, but all the people who surround you then will all be lackadasiacal hypocrites. The more you want to have nice things in college -- nobody -- having nobody who gets brusque with you and says, "You are a coward," or "You are lazy." You can have this, gentlemen. For your father's money, you can have anything. You can be surrounded by parasites, hypocrites, flatterers, and -- and have a good time, gentlemen. But the time will be just going into the ashcan, in the wastebox -- how do you call it? waste? -- wastepaper basket, because that time has not been used to roughen

you. It has only been used to smooth everything over. And I think, by and large, the college has reached this state in which nobody is allowed to slap you in the face, which you so often deserve.

What time is it, please?

(2:30.)

Wie?

(2:30.)

2:30. Oh, gets -- let's get up and open the windows, please.

[tape interruption]

We will have to be brief about this fourth calendar, because there will be another time in this course where I have to deal with its institution at great length. And that is the eternal calendar for all nations and all times of the Church, the religious calendar. It is obviously -- obvious that if you expose yourself to the calendar of the Church in any form--Sundays, or Easter, or Christmas, or in whatever form, Lent, fast, retreat--that you try to have a tradition from time immemorial, by which men harnessed their energies to plunge, and to branch out either for work, or for leisure, or for politics. The church calendar is the calendar universal in the sense that it prepares men for his outbursts, his expeditions, his excursions, his adventures in any one of the three fields. You can go to church as a businessman, as a worker, as a student, and as a soldier. And the Church en- -- equips you for all these ways of life in a very intricate manner, by appealing to your power of discernment of the spirits, and of dec- -- decision. The Church should teach one to distinguish between one's own will and God's will. And so the question is when to work, and when to play, and when to fight.

And therefore, I remind you that there are people who keep the torch and the flame burning on the altars of the Church now for 2,000 years, and the Jews for another 1,500 years. And that we have, from the times of the first Adam the altars of the divine service as an attempt to remind people that he can start on any of these roads, but must always know that they are limited, that they are not the whole story, that none of these calendars can totally engulf him. And -- the Church calendar tells the businessman that he cannot always make money.

In any one of these calendars, gentlemen, the man who pays lip service to the calendar is the man who shows you best the significance of the calendar, the

rascal. He's very useful man, because we can learn from him what he considers the -- the necessity of the calendar.

There was a man in White River Junction, gentlemen, who dealt with hundreds of hotels. And he sold to a friend of mine the Hotel Coolidge. And the negotiations -- the negotiations were dealt with we- -- weeks -- for weeks and weeks. And on Sundays, he had a Roman Catholic substitute. He was himself, of course, a good Protestant, the -- the salesman, and said -- and only sat by and listened to what this lawyer, the Italian lawyer--of Italian descent who was a Roman Catholic--said. You know, Roman Catholics are lax with their Sunday, compared to the puritanical tradition.

So the man always said, this hypocrite, "I can't do business on Sunday, because God frowns -- would frown on this, and I would no longer probably have the good luck which I have so far -- have had through my life, in making money."

But he was seated there, you see, and allowed his -- his associate to make the money.

Now I think that's a very great story, because the -- the hypocrite shows you, you see: he has this devouring passion of business, or work, of just the incessant operator, you see--operator, operator, another deal. Yet he is coerced by the Church calendar at least to pay -- you see, to wear a mask. And so he was sitting there, you see, and not -- listening in, but not saying a word.

I think that's a great tribute to the fact that the cooperation, or the parallelism of several calendars i- -- can be represented even in the shrewdest business operator in this country, and in the weakest link in the whole chain of our civilization. People will admit, you see, that there are extremes -- extremities to which they must not go. They must not overthrow the existence of the opposite calendar.

Now all these calendars together then point out the fact that man is torn, and that these various calendars develop in him very different qualities. The qualities of the Church calendar -- as I said, we don't go in. Again, we come back to all these calendars, but especially to that.

If you would only learn that the objective, the subjective, the eternal, and the creative calendar appeal to opposite qualities in you, then you would shrink back from your own image as you represent it today, as a -- as a kind-hearted donothing. That's not man. A creative man, gentlemen, is not faint-hearted. He is a bull; he's a fighter. And he is very, very brusque, and brutal, because he has a

great cause to defend, and to put through. And the eternal man is very humble. And the kind man may be a very good playboy. And the working man may be a very steady man. But neither steadiness nor kindness embrace the fullness of our -- your nature.

It is now my task to tell you, gentlemen, that these calendars perform something which would otherwise -- if we were natural beings, leave us all alone. Only through the discipline of these calendars do we have a common time. All times that people live together, all this talk about your generation, is the result of the establishment and the founding of common calendars. And all these calendars, gentlemen, came into being in one day, and had to be created. The calendars themselves are the cause of your and my living in the same time. This is a difficult subject, and I wish therefore to state it first dogmatically, gentlemen.

If you go to the modern man--the scientist and the people who are just dependent on the scientific method--they'll all share the opinions of this little booklet, which is called "Time and Universe," which I want to hold up as a scarecrow today, as the sum of all the stupidity that is taught today abou- -- on time in our western world, and through the stupidity of which we are in great danger to succumb to China and Russia, because they know a little better what time is.

This is by -- the Eddington Lecture for 1952, given in Cambridge, England, by a physicist. His dishonorable name is {Martin Johnson}. His dishon- -- honest, because he wants to reconcile religion and physics with the means of a physicist's argument. And he wants to tell us that all religion is mysticism, and whereas of course, physics is science. And so he said that the notion of time is either mystical or it is scientific.

If this is so, gentlemen, then there can be no Armistice Day, and there can be no celebration of the 4th of July, because he says the mystic has an inexplicable experience to his own. He cannot communicate it to anybody else. Everything we would -- we say about the calendar would be nonsense, because the calendar is nothing if it isn't a common calendar. If you and I cannot know what we're talking about when we undergo the same church calendar, or the same political calendar, or same working calendar -- if this was all mysticism, gentlemen, then this man may perhaps be right, but then we would have nothing to say to each other, because he says explicitly, "Mysticism is that which cannot be expressed, and scien- -- physics is that which can be scientifically communicated and measured."

He says that science deals with observable facts in the outer world. And so he puts the scientific time here, and says then -- dema- -- asks this question whether we live in an expanding universe, is this really true that the time of this

expanse is 10 to the 39th power--you know, that's the famous figure at which Eddington arrived for the time that it had taken to expand for the existing universe in which we live--and this would be the mystic living here, behind his navel, and -- and trying to have private feelings. Very unhealthy.

These are the two times which today are admitted by the people who believe in the scientific method. The mystical time experience of the -- which cannot be communicated to anybody else--"communion with God," or however they call it--you also may call it "boredom"--and the other, the scientific, which you can call "technical," you see, because it takes, you see, it's important for technical -- to our techniques to know how long it takes before the bomb explodes so that the airplane can get away from the place of the explosion. So that is computable time.

This would be known time, just filled time, but with no expanse, because for the mystic it doesn't matter whether it's eternity, or whether it's the moment; it's immeasurable, you see. Measure-less time. And this is measurable time.

Now gentlemen, the eternal calendar of the Church, and the creative calendar of citizenship, of politics, bear no such either scientific or mystical character. And that's the only -- are the only times of which we really know something by our living behavior. The calendar of the Church and the calendar of the political entity called the United States of America, gentlemen, they live neither by moments--of a second or of a day--nor do they live by eternity, where we cannot know when it begins and when it will end. What you and I know, that the United States exist since 1776 or 1783, and that they were prepared in a prehistory since 1620 or 1610--since the people went to Virginia, and -- to Massachusetts. And -- so that's 150 years before, and then it's 170 years to this day, and now we are in a critical phase of the decadence of the United States. If we don't do something about it--this much you can know: that if you don't refound the Union, gentlemen, now, it will not last very long, because the conditions under which it was founded no longer exist. There is no Jeffersonian democracy. There aren't farmers, and without small family holdings, you cannot have the Constitution of the United States in operation. Those of you who have taken Philosophy 9 may remember that I have tried to draw your attention to this fact, that we are in a very critical situation, because the -- our Constitution is totally inoperative today, not because of anybody's bad will, bec- -- but the times have changed. The conditions are not the same. We must refound the United States.

That's -- will be your task, gentlemen. Or there will be no United States. And it is still not decided what will be the truth.

I had a friend -- as you know, Mr. {Kramer,} who knows Asia very well.

Here, he's a Dutchman. He has lived all over the world. He loves America. He has lived here one year and-a-half. He has seen our behavior in this Oriental crisis. And he says the United States have no future. The future is between China and Russia, because they have missed their day. If they had recognized Communist China in 1949, if they had had the generosity, the Americans, then they would have been in the game. But now they're just counted out. That's what a serious man, who loves this country, and has absolutely no axe to grind--he's a Dutchman--and has everything to lose, as a matter of fact, when this prophecy, as a white man, you see--what he feels: that you have jeopardized, jettisoned all the heritage of the West. But it's a prolonging fight. You -- we still keep -- it's a holding position for Europe. America is, after all, nothing but the elongated trunk of this elephant of all Europe. And the proboscis is still there, but then it has lost its raison d'ˆtre, except as the el- -- prolongation, extension of the lease on life for Europe. You believe that you have your own foundation, gentlemen. I think the sickness of the citizen calendar -- civic calendar is a very serious sign. If you cannot experience for a hundred years, history, then it is very doubtful that you can make history. It's very serious. And you don't want to make history. You want to forget it. It's your -- all your endeavor.

And the prognostication for the United States from this -- such a gentle and affectionate friend shocked me deeply. He said this to -- to me last Sunday in my own house. And I couldn't -- I couldn't fight it, because he had a profound insight into the -- the complete defeatism of this country, the cowardice of this country. I mean, a country, gentlemen, that does not send a -- a ship through the Gulf of Aqaba--or what's the name of it?--that says to the Egyptians beforehand that they -- we will send a ship, has lost its freedom of action. You have seen this debate that's going on perhaps, how to secure this -- this harbor for the Israeli. And -- and they -- they have been so stupid, so absolutely negligent in duty, that we say ahead of time to the enemy of this proposal--to the Egyptians--that we will send a ship. If they shoot, we will withdraw.

Gentlemen, that's the end of politics. That is mere cowardice. There is no excuse for this, gentlemen. That's for -- a finishing school for young girls. We have lost the meaning of action. We talk, and allow the others to act -- and invite them to act. We tell them beforehand, "Please act; and then we can withdraw the ship." Never has such a -- a thing has never happened in the history of the world before, except when an empire ended, and taken, and had seen its fate.

Now there are deep reasons for this, gentlemen. The -- United States always were a holding operation, they were always a beach on which people landed--expellees and refugees. They never meant to form a -- a -- a -- powerful { }. And we all must agree that we ourselves came to this country--or your ancestors came, you see--to be through with -- with history and politics. So of

course, that -- that -- now we pay the penalty for all the benefits we have derived from this -- from this exclusion, so to speak, from world politics.

But I only want to warn you, gentlemen, we are not yet inside history, because we are so very rich. As you can imagine, wealth makes people very envious. And if the whole world wants -- is envious of the United States, I don't think that our wealth will help us very much. Quite the contrary. It will draw everybody as an enemy against us.

Now the political and the eternal calendar, gentlemen, allow you and me to know that we live on the day in which this lecture was given--on November 4th, 1952, in Cambridge, England. What this man, {Martin Johnson,} and what -- my colleague, Mr. Mandelbaum, or what my -- colleague in the physics department--let's take Mr. {Schaeffer}, or anybody quite innocent--they are very innocent -- these scientists, you see. They are not responsible for the creation of time. Why should we demand from them anything? We have -- asked them to discover things in the universe, which they do to perfection. And therefore the scientist does himself wrong if he thinks that he can know anything about time. He -- cannot possibly know anything about this problem, gentlemen: why you and I devote to each other now two hours -- one hour and-a-half, to learn from each other. That's a very mystical process, he would say. It isn't mystical at all. It is the founding of the community, which we do together. And the founding of the community consists in this, that I alone would have no time, except my own lifetime, and you alone would have no other time but your own lifetime. But where we can pool our time energies, I can prolong your life and you could prolong my life. I take you backward, and you take me forward. What I'll tell you will still be valid, you see, when you live and I'm dead. And what you hear takes you back by many generations, and you can be committed into an -- avenue of time which has started long ago. And otherwise it cannot be done.

We have to pool our time energies in order to gain time, gentlemen. The problem of a calendar is to gain time by unifying time, which isn't so very complicated. If you all have to have your own time, you see, you have no time, so to speak. You have just to run through -- take yourself as an animal. The animal has no time. It's constantly rushing for its own food, and for its own shelter, and for its own --. But if you pool the energies, you can of course make over time. Gain time. You gain time by the process of teaching and learning--that's a very stupid, perhaps, and simple example, but it is the most direct example. You can perhaps understand -- if you take one hour time out, here--to listen to me--that you can gain a whole century of understanding, which otherwise wouldn't mean anything to you.

But I want to make a -- much simpler point, and much more colossal

point, which takes us beyond this very little, and yet true, example of an { }. What -- how many minutes do I have? Wie?

(Two minutes.)

So I only announce then the program for the next time. In order to have any time together, in order to pool our time energies, in order to have a common history, a common celebration, and a common work, and a common education--as you all enjoy as a natural thing, gentlemen--every one of us has to give up part of his own time. And the times -- the times that are created in these four calendars by this sacrifice or contribution of part of our time to this common enterprise is really the only time of which we ever become conscious. That is, the consciousness of man is bound together with the creation of common times. The animal has no consciousness, no self-consciousness. It cannot look into the mirror of its own existence, because animals cannot pool their time energies. Everything you know of yourself, of your aims in life, everything you can state to yourself, depends on the fact that you know very well on what day in the calendar you live today. That you can place yourself, for example, in our era and say, "This is 1957."

This all had to be done, and has to be done time and again. If not, the 14th Amendment is declared constitutional -- unconstitutional. If you do not live after the Civil War, and if you do not, by a common calendar of politics, re-create the fact that you live after the Civil War, gentlemen, you begin to be- -- li- -- live before the Civil War. At this moment, the American people try to live before the two world wars. And as I say, in the South, Mr. {Byrnes} had this -- {Byrne} has -- {Byrnes} it was, had this terrible thing to say: "After all the South did win the Civil War," he said { }. This can be done. You can annul the common time experience.

And with this negative statement, I want to announce the problem of the next time, gentlemen: the simple fact that we have nothing to do with mystical time experience or physicists' time experience. Both are quite unimportant aspects of time: the navel onlooker, and the watch -- stopwatch timer. What do we care from their time? That's perfectly subordinate to the fact that we live in the 20th century. What's the 20th century, gentlemen? That's the creation of man. And how such 20 century are created -- is created? That's for you and me very important, because we have tried in this country to destroy the possibility of having a common time. You go to the hillbillies in -- in West Virginia--or not in West Virginia; that's not so bad as Virginia--and Kentucky in Harlan County where they worship the snakes--they do--you know that these people do not live in God's time anymore. They have their own time.

And everywhere in the United States, time is breaking up. The common time of the United States is a pure fiction today, is in great danger. And so is the common time of mankind. Because common time is not a physicist's experience at all. And it is not a mystic's thought or opinion at all. What it is, however, I'm going to tell you next time.