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(Philosophy 10, February 26th, 1954.)

Let me repeat then, gentlemen, just two phrases about listening and reading. Listening means to discover one's identity, and listening means also to put yourself under an authority. It is self-discovery, with the help of somebody else. A child that would live -- grow up in an orphan asylum would have to go mad, or would have a trauma, because nobody would make it feel that it is needed. And the great difference, gentlemen, between this country and Europe has been, over the last 50 years, that in Europe, the -- the population had increased, there was so little room that, less and less, people felt that they were needed, whereas in this country -- at least when I came to this country, you still got the great feeling that people were glad that you were there. You're out -- are -- out west in Montana, there are so few people and there is so much space that people are glad to meet you. They really mean it. And in New England, it's a little different, of course. The people here are quite glad if they don't meet anybody.

But this you have to convey to a living being, that it has been expected. That is why birth control, gentlemen, is -- so bad. Not because of the limitation of numbers, but because, more and more, the parents forget that they have to wait for their children, that it is -- to be an expecting mother doesn't mean to be pregnant. But to expect the baby in full joyfulness, that this is her destiny. And you have lost this. If you say "expectant mother," you snicker, and you think that's something dirty. It isn't. It is the expectation that the child needs in order to want to live. No child wants to live when it feels that it hasn't been expected. And I look at all these talks that go on in conversations that people get children because they did -- although they didn't mean it. Something went wrong. Isn't that terrible? Imagine that -- that such -- contraceptives have been used that the child one day overhears the parents saying, "Well, we really didn't want this child. But there it is." That's the end of the world. Please don't laugh. It's a little bit too serious for that.

It is so -- that's the world into which you have come, gentlemen, because you have the -- the -- there has been a defiance of these 10 commandments of -- of the men- -- the mind, because after all, every mind to itself. Now, if your mind is selfsufficient, then of course your will reigns supreme. And then you can say of yourself, "I didn't mean to have a child." But if you have merit, then you know that to marry means to expect a child. It's identical. You may still then say, "I only would like to have some children," and not innumerable. Within the pattern of expectation, you can certainly perhaps be selective, but you can, not as it has

been the -- the habit in this country, say to yourself, "It's up to me whether I wa- -- have children or not."

Once you say this, the family is destroyed. And it hasn't to be physically destroyed. You still can have five children, but you have no children. And gentlemen, you know in your heart that you have no right to educate these children and tell them anything, because you didn't mean them. Your will was not subdued to this great cause of life that -- pulses -- pulsates through your system and accidentally passes through your system as one station of its own course. You have made yourself the master of your own destiny, and you boast of it. And so you feel that this child is just an accident. The child knows this very well, that you have such a religion. You can send this -- child to 10 Sunday schools. You can make it a Roman Catholic, and send it to confession. That doesn't improve its unhappiness as a human being that has not been expected. There your religion lies. It doesn't lie in all these ceremonials, and all your con- -- you can then go -- you yourself even become a Roman Catholic. I know Roman Catholics who go to Rome because they are such deep sinners that they -- they think this lean-to will -- will cure their ills. They have no relation to other people.

And the first relation you must have is to the people who have given you life and the people who wait that you give them life. Whether you teach them, gentlemen, as I do at this moment with you, or whether you beget them physically, there's no -- no difference. I at least know that my thought is not complete before you have heard it. But you don't know that your life is not complete before its best -- its very best, the seed of your loins has begotten new life. So you waste it.

This is serious, gentlemen. We are only tenants on this earth part-time, where -- life is passing through us. But you and I, as you well know, we are after all like an electric bulb. One day it's burned out and another bulb has to be put in its place. What would you say of an electric bulb that would boast that it begets the electric light? Does it? Without the cable and the power plant, there is certainly no -- nothing.

Now that's what you and I are, after all, electric bulbs lightening up at this moment mentally. And you think this mind is yours? It isn't. It has been put into you by somebody telling you, "listen." And at this very moment you became a candescent lamp. But the condition is still that the cable goes into you, and the cable enters you not by your thoughts, you see, but only through this tremendous integration which happens, that somebody call you by your name and said, "Everything which from now on you may be able to think is under one and the same person's responsibility." And it -- you cannot go schizophrenic, this means, you see. You cannot think one thing one day and something else the other day,

and do nothing about it. The many thoughts that enter your system must be unified. They must be verified. You must stand up for them.

So gentlemen, "listen" makes the thinker. Reading makes the thoughts. "Listen" says, "I will lend you some of my authority." A father, by calling his son, "My son," you know, gives a great secret into the life of the son. He promises the son that one day he will be like -- like his father. That's the great essence, gentlemen, of children. To have legitimate children means to convey to somebody else the recognition that someday the other fellow will have the same authority as speaker himself.

You think, gentlemen, that I have now to give you the same authority at this moment as I have. I'm not going to do this. I want you all to become as knowing as I am. Therefore I cannot admit that you know at this moment, because otherwise you will confuse that what you know now with what can be known. Isn't that obvious?

This is the honor of a student, gentlemen. A teacher cannot teach his student unless he sees in you future teachers. A father cannot teach his son unless he considers the son a potential father. That's all done in this one word "listen," because anybody who says to somebody, "Listen," he isn't clubbing him down. He isn't putting him in chains. He is not tormenting him. He is not blackmailing him. But he gives him his freedom. In the -- you think that listening, calling, or claiming obedience is unworthy of a free -- man. And you therefore say, "I begin with reading." That's how you think the world is built. "Here is an individual. I look into the world. And then I learn," as you say, "by trial and error and by experience." That doesn't happen. That's an error.

The mind does not start from you. It has to be put into you, the right mind. "Clothe us in our righteous mind," we pray in the famous hymn by Whittier, because we have no mind. We are demented. But your heresy is that you think: here is this brat, growing up and then it begins to think. Doesn't think at all. It's just breaking the porcelain. Like the elephant in the china shop, you behave with all the goods of mankind, unless your parents and your teachers have been good enough to -- to address you as future men, women, teachers, presidents of the United States, ministers, doctors -- that is, as great people to come. But this has -- somebody has to be told. Otherwise this little child, you see, thinks it will never have an important role in life. It is just left to its own unrest, its own curiosity, its own obscenity, its own sensuousness, its own appetites, its own desires. Now, for such a -- such a child has no right for -- to civil liberties. Every human being has a right to be treated as a future king -- as a future ruler, that is; as a future priest, that is, as a man of name, of reputation; and as a future teacher. Isn't that clear? We need you, Sir, gentlemen. We need you in your -- own hour and time.

Well, how can you already at the first moment behave as though this was your s- -- action, you see? It has to be an action which you inherit. What we call "heritage" still has this -- this meaning. We always speak of the "sacred heritage," but it's a very pious, empty phrase in most men's mouths in this country, is it not? Because if it was a heritage, you would ask the question, "How do I get at it?" Well, certainly not -- by not receiving anything. And how do we receive? By being called to the inheritance. And how are we called to the inheritance? By being named, by being called the heir to this inheritance. And before you aren't made sure that everybody expects you to inherit the earth, you can't inherit it. It's impossible.

So this word "listen," gentlemen, is tremendous. It has been so neglected for 30 years, that the whole nation had to be turned into soldiers, WACs and WAVEs, and obey orders so that people at least at the age of 20 could be made to listen, instead of as babies. Gentlemen, as soon as the order "listen," is not ex- -- enacted in the first seven years of life, and planted there firmly so that for the rest of your life you recognize the necessity of obedience, then you will get a factory system in which everybody has to obey blindly. Then you will get a war system in which everybody has to be shot dead without his -- his contribution at all. And that's what we have. We have an industrial system in which everybody has to pay polite obedience to orders, and we have an army system in which everybody has to be -- is drafted with or without his will, because you have not listened in your youth. The parents had nothing to tell you. They have left it to the corporal, and to the master sergeant, and to the boss -- to the foreman in the factory. Do you think -- don't you think it's a funny system which we have?

Gentlemen, we have a system without listening in your youth. So the listening comes later. So I see people at 60 still being in menial jobs. I see people at 65 here fired from this college as teachers at the age where they should be appointed, because people in the old age in this country are sent to hell, because children must be -- live in Heaven -- be made to live in Heaven. You have a fool's paradise.

Now to -- till now you have lived in far too good a life, so for the rest of your life, you will live in a much less nice life. Why this is so, I do not know. I think it would be a real right to begin with hardship and to end up in -- in Heaven. But people are so afraid to keep you in paradise until you have finished your -- your last class in -- in some post-graduate studies, that then suddenly you are plunged into a -- blind obedience.

We have perverted the sequence of the commandments, but you cannot -- if you do not listen from the first to the seventh year, then you will be -- have to listen from the 20th -- 20th to their 70th year. And that's the state of affairs in this

country at this moment. And it is only when you look back to the first 20 years of your life that you will be able to say that you know what freedom is, because there you are nothing but free. And that's a bad freedom.

The second command, gentlemen, we said is however necessary to correct an abuse of listening. People who have to, are allowed to obey. Read the biography of a great historian like Macaulay. George Macaulay was the historian of England. And he also was viceroy of India at one time, and he was made to learn and to listen very early in life. Well, he became a voracious reader, because we said reading is our own correction of the commands given us. By reading, we bypass our authorities and get new authorities into our ken. You see, the reading in your life, however, is meaningless. The best books have to be made assigned reading in this college. And of course, they are devaluated {by} -- by that, because you won't read them spontaneously. Not one of the books that are assigned reading in this college in the English department should ever be assigned reading, because you should have read them at 15 secretly and furtively, without anybody's permission. You should have gone out and tried to find these books.

One cannot give assigned reading, gentlemen. Perhaps you take this down, gentlemen: reading cannot be commanded.

I had three boys last year who wrote me letters after graduation from college that I should give them lists of books to read. I said, "Sorry. Sonny, I can't do this. Since you have graduated and in four years have not found any way of deciding what books you might find on your way to -- through life later on, I certainly cannot now write you and -- and tell you what to read. I would make a fool of everything. It won't work."

You go to college in order to know what you still might discover yourself. But you won't. You -- you com- -- reading, you see, has a -- strangely enough, our whole education is -- is based on self-reading. That is, on -- on your reading things. But assigned reading is not reading anymore, because it doesn't come from your own anxiety to bypass the authority that makes you listen and obey orders, you see, and to find out for yourself. The dialectics of reading and listening is so complete that if you have no listening, you will be stifled in your intensity of reading. You may read in order to read Esquire, I mean, because there are some naked girls. Gentlemen, that's not reading, obviously. Reading is a real necessity of supplementing the -- the -- the specific situation of the authority with which you have -- under which you live. It's a great thing. You have to round out your world to the real world, have you not? So listening tries to complete that which the parents, and the town, and the church in your village or town have given you to the true universe.

(Sir, when you get to this reading step, are you supposed to completely divorce yourself from the listening step?)

Not at all. I talked -- all this last time already. It's a constant -- both work.

(Well, then what these boys are doing in writing you a letter, isn't that asking ...)

But at 22, you cannot.

(Well, they're still listening, in that they're -- they're putting themselves under your ...)

Sir, I can tell them how -- to fall in love, or to protest some political issue at that time. But the reading stage, if it hasn't hit them after 21 years, I would say it will never. If they read at my request, it isn't reading. It's just -- obeying orders. So it isn't reading. It's a fiction. It's the opposite.

(However, isn't it putting yourself under an authority, in other words, you?)

Pardon me?

(Isn't it putting yourself under an authority? In other words, that's what they- 're trying to do?)

Yes, but then they must come and live with me a year, and I'll certainly be glad to educate them. If they had said this, that they wanted to spend a year with me in my house, I could have talked about -- to them about this. But that would be oral, you see, authority, real authority, in flesh and blood.

But you want to mix metaphors. You want me to use authority which leads to obedience and orders, to make them read, which is autonomous, enjoyable, you see, and spontaneous. This I cannot do.

If, for example, these people want to help me in my own work, I have lots of books to read. And I could give them, but that would be assistance, you see, to my work. That would become quite different. You see the difference? It wouldn't be their education.

So gentlemen, perhaps you get a little excited. There is a tremendous precision in the mental life of the race. It isn't so that you can do as you please. If this listening's under an authority of whom we have the conviction that they love us, and the reading which means our mental love to the wonders of the universe -- if

that isn't in balance, both go wrong. You get then the obedience in much later times of life, and you -- listening loses its edge, so to speak, you see, its sharpness, and you get bored. You become blas‚. And you say -- have all three commentators speak at the same time, over three different machines as I have heard it in a dormitory here -- you see, three broadcasts going at once. You can do -- you -- you do every such thing, you see. You no l- -- don't -- you don't even read anymore, because you read three things at the same time.

This is very strict. There is as much necessity of {rinding} -- rounding out the universe in which we grow up as there is a necessity to find yourself in the specific -- place in the universe first. You cannot first live in generalities and then become specific, gentlemen. It has always to be the other way around, because you must be sure of your specific place in the universe be- -- before you can learn anything about the universe. And you try the opposite. The whole system of education today tries to -- first to tell a child what the whole thing is about and then tell him, "You find your own place." This is impossible.

There are -- as you well know, there are so many people around in this country today who can't ever -- can never find their specific place. They join the world government organization. Is this a specific place? It looks a little wide to me. Then they buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica, even in the worst edition now from Chicago, because they want to be encyclopedic. Gentlemen, as long as you aren't quite sure that people love you and need you, all your encyclopedic knowledge is of no avail. "Rounding out" means to -- use the encylopedia. "Encyclopedia" means an education in a cycle, in a circle, all round. The reading stage is the rounding-out of your specific sp- -- place. It is never possible first to be general and then to be specific. Please take this down, gentlemen, because the rest of your life you will have to labor under this problem.

If you have to make a decision, gentlemen, a Lord Charnwood, a great English -- {Chernwood}, a great English politician, and a statesman in the House of Lords, has written a book on the Gospel of St. John, and he sums up the whole wisdom of his whole life, he says. At the end, he says, "Every religious experience begins with a command."

Now a command is always specific. If you tell somebody, "Bring me a glass of water," there is more religion in this, you see, than if you say, "The earth is round." "The earth is round" is utterly indifferent. You see, that's not specific. But "Bring me a glass of water," that can be a step into life.

It's strange. And once you -- that's the difference between religion and philosophy. And that's the difference between progressive education and real education. In a real education, the child first is asked to bring me a glass -- his father a

glass of water. From there on, it can learn what water is, and what a child is, and what a father is, and what the whole earth is, with salt water and -- and -- and fresh water. But you cannot, before you have been told, "Bring me a glass of water," philosophize about water. Useless. Every religious experience begins with a command. That's the gist of the explanation of the word "listen." And that's why the 10 Commandments, gentlemen, are immortal, because they do not begin with generalities. But they begin with -- which -- which is the first word of the 10 Commandments?

("Thou shalt," Sir.)

What?

("Thou.")

Und before?

("I.")

No. What's the first word of the 10 Commandments?

("Thou." The first word of the First Commandment is "Thou.")

No. "Harken Israel." Harken. That's just another word for "listening." Harken. Is it not? Harken. If you have not harkened, you cannot speak. If you have not harkened, you cannot think.

Gentlemen, the sequence which we have discovered is very important. In the mental process, harkening comes first, thinking comes second, speaking comes third. You think thinking comes first, and speaking comes second. That's not true. You have to have listened, you have to have harkened, before you can think. And you can -- have -- may think then about what you have thought, but then you must speak again.

Harkening con- -- is the -- what we shall put around the first four commandments. The first is listening. The second is reading. Now come two more. Gentlemen, "learn" and "play," we had said. Let me now tell you that all four are under this general -- general heading of childhood, of harkening. When we play -- we already debated play a little bit -- we'll find that playing is a reaction against learning, as reading is against listening. The terms, I mean, are of cour- -- would be -- seem to be interchangeable.

To what do we harken when we play? Let's find out about this. Then you will

see that harkening is really the excellency of childhood, far above the little -- divisions of reading and obeying. I could of course here have said, "obey." But I didn't do so, because I thought that would hurt your feelings. There is really in these four commands some delicate unity. When a child plays, it harkens to the voice that tells him, "I'm young -- you are young. Go play. Don't worry. The grown-ups worry. You have time." When a child plays, it has the conviction that it has time. Now that's a command. You have time, you see. No -- don't be -- don't worry. Don't be tense. Relax, as you also say.

So in this very subtle sense, a man who is able to play, or to sleep well, also hears this command that he has time, that he is not immediately in demand, that he is not at the front, you see, of life, that he can go to sl- -- to rest. Whenever you say to your friend, "Relax," you try to convey to him that he isn't so important as he thinks.

And in this sense then, you see, play is a very specific selectivity of saying to a person, "At this moment, you are not needed, not really needed. You have still time to play." When we can play -- and you know, some people cannot play, then they -- they are soul-sick, because they cannot hear the interval of a rest beat in music. If music has no beat in which there is no sign, there is no music. The funny thing is that music also means non-music, to be music. Eternal noise is not music, as you can see. Music always entails the freedom of one moment having no music.

As you well know, in an opera, the sudden cessation of the music can have a tremendous impact on the op- -- on the music. In the Ninth Symphony, the moment before the chorus begins to sing -- you know, in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony by Beethoven, there is a chorus and before, there is -- of course, a sudden expectation has to be aroused. And one of the ex- -- ways of which you arouse expectation is silence. Silence, gentlemen, of play is a silence of expectation. When shall I be called? We talked about this last time already. I only remind you that I am not arbitrarily saying that "Harken Israel," that this word "harken" is something that you also can find in all the other commandments. You have to be able, you see, to get out of your busy-bodyness, of your running. And you have to listen to this carefully, to harken to it.

To play then, gentlemen, is not simply to do something. It is also in the same time to do nothing, seriously, you see. When we play -- somebody tells you to play, it is ambiguous, because it says as much "Do nothing" as it says "Do something," because the something you do in not real doing. Isn't that true?

So it's a qualified doing, playing. It isn't yet the real thing. That's why children want to play with serious things. They want to play christening, and mar-

riage, and funerals. And our modern plays are very poor, because they do not allow the children to enact the great events of life. That's what the children want, because at least in content, they want to be grown-ups, because they know the time hasn't yet come when they can get married, but they yearn for growing up. All our modern plays, I think, are very poor in this respect, because they try to condemn children to doing non-serious thing in every respect. But a child knows very well it cannot -- it cannot have a child, little girl. But it wants to play marriage. She wants to play marriage just the same, and wedding, you see. In order at least to be -- have a semblance of seriousness, then you have the two halves of playing. By not having a child, really, you play, you see. But by playing wedding, you already look forward to what's going to happen to you one day. If you however have these silly plays as of today, where there is not a semblance of serious life in the play, you stultify this child completely.

Now look at nine-tenths of the sales that -- of the -- of the toys that are sold in New York at the Schwarzes. This is all nonsense. It's total nonsense. And then of course, the outcome is that you play with war and hydrogen bombs, because that's at least serious, and that's what a boy wants. But you can introduce a boy to his later life playing, and I think that we should do.

Now "learn" and "play" I said are dialectically opposed. Gentlemen, to learn means to select, to realize that certain things which we have read, and certain things our parents have told us have to be remembered. Learning is the development of memory. And there I have to make a -- a strong point, gentlemen, that you don't know what memory is. Memory is that which waits to be fulfilled. All memory is promise. But you treat memory so accidental, because you no longer learn by heart. When your pa- -- grand- -- great-grandparents learned a hymn, it was because it was a promise that one day you would either compose a hymn yourself, or you would sing it as deacons, or in the choir of your church. That is, the memory stores away those things of the past that belong to the future. You however treat memory as accidental. If you remember a telephone line -- if you remember a -- a -- a license plate, it just got stuck in your mind. You treat memory as that which gets stuck in your mind.

Memory is much -- something much more sacred, gentlemen. Memory should be that which you select as future loves. A child cannot yet love. It can be affectionate. It can be sympathetic. But love and jealousy are not for children, really. If they are, they are premature. They suffer from -- from love. In a -- I have seen great love in a child. But it's very dangerous. You feel -- it's like a fever, when such a child has great passions. Children may be aloof. They may be affectionate. They may be glad. They may be joyful, but once they begin to be passionate, there is something dangerous. It's an anticipation. You cannot -- some -- some children are so passionate, and you can then only protect them from too much

passion, too early coming, you see, making them very early old.

But the child must learn to love. But you do not learn to love by -- in any other way but by loving to love. That is, to learn and to read are not the same. And to learn and to listen are not the same. Your ch- -- your father curses. Your father is violent. Or he's a drunkard. Or he's nervous -- or he's a -- he's a nervous wreck. Or your mother is -- is depressed. This is not what you must store away in your memory, but the -- the important things she has told you, that -- they must stick.

In any case, whether it's the -- the orders you receive, the words you hear from your parents spoken -- or your teachers, by the way, or the maid, or whoever it is, who's older -- and the things you read, many of them you ought to forget. If I look back into my youth, before 10 years of age, I really don't remember anything to speak of. Some -- really, some pictures. So I had a very happy youth, obviously, because I -- the things, you see, nothing hurt me, obviously. And so in the first 10 years, I must of course -- remember innumerable things, but not things of the environment. I got educated. I obviously learned how to obey. I learned how to behave. We were seven children at home. I obviously learn how to get on with my -- my six others -- sib- -- my sisters and my parents. And the maid and my friends, et cetera. All these things I learned, but I have forgotten com- -- completely how I {learned it}. Obviously I did learn, because then afterwards you know how to speak to people, how to make them comfort -- feel comfortable, how to welcome them, how to say goodbye to them. Many things.

We learn innumerable things in our youth, but what you keep as a memory, that is, so that you know that you know it, that's developed in the third stage when we {live}. That's a very high-grade selectivity of the things we cannot yet fully understand or practice, or do something about.

For example, obviously you must learn that the Declaration of Independence was not just on any one 4th of July. This you do not learn. This you do, by having a holiday on the 4th of July. You see, this you do by listening, simply doing. You obey then. You put on a -- a fresh sheet -- shirt on the 4th of July, and during the day, you get it dirty. And that's how you celebrate the 4th of July. But you have to learn that it was in 1776. This is the additional thing which you can only, you see, receive by learning.

Now why is it important for you to learn that the 4th of July is not just a celebration, as you think it is, but that it has a date? Well, gentlemen, by learning that the United States came into being in 1776, you select out of the ocean of facts one event which is so important that you have to do something about it. Importance means always that something has to be treated very delicately, because if you don't do something about it, it will perish from the earth. Importance is

always something about which somebody has to do something. And "unimportant" means nobody has to do anything about it. You think that the -- the 4th of July for a child would not be important enough. By adding 1776, you can figure it out, gentlemen, that this republic is how old? Hundred and -- how many years this is? 70- -- 78, isn't that right?

(Yeah.)

Wie? 178 years. Gentlemen, that must give you the shivers. Anything that is 178 years old is in great danger of going to sleep. You have to refound the republic. The older something is, the more care has to be taken that it doesn't get too old, or obsolete. Obviously we are just in process at this moment of refounding the United States of America. After two world wars, that's the minimum that is required.

The more you know about this, the more the word "1776" will grow on you in devotion and in awe. Because on the one-hand side, you will say, "How wonderful that the thing is that old." On the other hand, you will say, "How terrifying that it has come to me already after such a long time that we have to do something about it. I no longer can rely on it automatically."

How -- the more you come to think, gentlemen -- I hope you will in the next 30 years -- about the date 1776, the more you will see that it entails tremendous obligations. It will entail that you have to go back to 1620, because after 178 years, you will have to dig down to the roots in order to get beyond our own day and time into a- -- next 176 years. You will have to try to add to the tree the deepest roots possible, so that it may spread up and grow again to much more. Another 178 years again, that's a big order, you know. How do we get it? You know that a -- tree cannot grow if it hasn't roots enough -- the -- roots deep enough, so that it can carry -- the roots can nourish it and feed it and give it the impetus.

1706, gentlemen, is the -- the figure, in my estimation which an American child simply has to learn, by rote. The contempt in which learning by rote is held in this country means that most of you have no vision of the future, because you have in your memory not many things which you remember as expectations, as hopes, as challenge. I can tell you that to this day, I have treated my memory as something that waits to be fulfilled. I learned perhaps too many things in my youth: languages, and historical dates, and quotations, and choruses from the Greeks or from the German poets, songs by Schubert, and I -- I don't know -- know what. And of course, I -- my memory is also plug- -- clogged with unnecessary memories. I have a good memory, so I know still all the telephone numbers of -- of the days when I was 10 years old and the telephone was introduced into

our house for the first time. That's unnecessary that I should still know my telephone line of the year 1898. But I do.

But the other things, most things I know, gentlemen, have always been teasing me and telling me, "Do something about it," because what I knew was not enough. I wanted to know what it really meant. And this mistreatment, gentlemen, of your memory is one of the things you shouldn't do to your children. You have not learned enough, by rote. You have not learned any language to speak of, not even English. When you learn a language, you forget it after two years. Isn't that the truth? You say you have learned a language and then you don't do anything about it.

What -- I do no longer care for all this, gentlemen. When I came here to Dartmouth, I tried to talk to the students, telling them that if they had had French, or Italian, or Spanish, they should subscribe to a magazine or newspaper of that country and read it every week on the side. And that would be -- keep it alive. They laughed at me. I tried to persuade them to make a report on a book in a language they had learned in my class, so -- making their contribution on the one-hand side to all the others who didn't know their language, and keeping their language not rusty. And they all laughed and said, "Oh, we had this. It's all over. Never again."

Gentlemen, you are very poor people, because you are so happy, you see. The misery of being happy would be the best title over American education, because you suffer from too much happiness. Everybody wants to make you happy. Well, nobody can make anybody happy, to tell you the truth. That's impossible. And if you want to be happy today, you will be very unhappy tomorrow, because life is one, and any attempt to make part of it happy ends in the terrible calamity that the next day you resent not being so happy as you were yesterday. But if you have made yourself voluntarily a little unhappy today, because you want to be happy for the whole of life, and make the whole life a blessed life, then it doesn't matter what happens in any one day. It is absolutely in- -- indifferent. It isn't important, gentlemen, anything that happens to me one day, if my whole life has meaning. And if my whole life has no meaning, it doesn't have -- help me at all that people try to make me happy today by giving me champagne, you see. They can make me drunk, but what a hangover!

The problem, gentlemen, of fulfilling a life -- which is the only true happiness we must {run} for, means that from the cradle to the grave, your life should be one. Everything that is needed to make this life one must be suffered. And nothing that makes one day exceedingly nice or happy is really very important, because it's otherwise just drunkenness. And the whole attempt of this country at this moment is to make the single day happy and the life meaningless. And

that's nonsense. It isn't worth anything. It always ends in suicide, or in melancholia, or in mental breakdowns. Look at the people who have mental breakdowns. They were made happy every day by their respective husband, or -- or -- or parents, or what-not. And then they go to Brattleboro, because it was too much for them to be happy every one day and having no meaning in their whole life.

So, memory -- please put it into the future. This is the step you have to take out of the ordinary psychology. It is not a tin can, memory. All things that are -- deserve to be remembered are things -- we have to do something about it. And whether it's to go -- if you hear of the Vatican, you want to travel there one day. Think how important it is for modern man to put many such memories into one soul so that, when you have the means, you know what to do with them, and if you have the time, that you know where to go, that you are prepared to look for the things for which you have been waiting all your life.

It's a great problem today to know what to do after 40 years. There are the airplanes, and there is the jet -- jet plane. You can go -- fast as you can, but you don't know where you want to go. Well, memory tells you. Memory, you remember that somebody told you, or a book told you in your youth that it is very worthwhile to go to the Balearic Islands; so you go. And if -- the more you have remembered, that is, the more you have cultivated this memory, the more will have clustered around this in the length of time. You see, if you learn one hymn by Paul Gerhardt, "Now let us thank the {govern-} -- " or whatever it is. "Let us prou-" -- what -- how does this? In English, I don't know. I learned it of course in German, this text. Te deum laudamus, now we praise God.

You will one day, because memory forces you to do this, be interested to know something of the man's life. If you know something about the man's life, Paul Gerhardt, who wrote these things, you will also become interested one day in the chorale music in general, and finally you will {end up} like Albert Schweitzer, by being the great expert on Bach, and comforting himself in Africa by his great love for Bach not only, but financing his own hospital in Africa, as you know, by giving Bach concerts in America. You may have -- must have heard of Albert Schweitzer, some of you.

Well, that was a hobby, and it was a memory. And it was a memory which was developed in the right vein, because he knows of course, every piece of music by heart, gentlemen. And that's hard work. And this hard work you have been spared.

And gentlemen, if I were you, I would now go home and read -- learn one sonnet of Shakespeare, or some such thing, you can pick what you -- {an ode} by

Horace every day one, and you will be very grateful to me for doing th- -- if I -- if you really follow this out, because then in your old age, you will have something to enlarge upon. And you have nothing at this moment, except the funnies. And the funnies are nothing to be remembered. They are something to be forgotten. And that's why you should not cluster your mind with the funnies. That's the only reason why the funnies are so bad for the children of our days, you see, because it is nothing to be remembered, because the next funnies -- otherwise there would be no room for the next funnies, because, gentlemen, that which is to be remembered must sink down so deep that it can wait.

You must learn anything that has -- cannot wait for your future. It is not some cork that swims on the surface. The difference between reading and learning, gentlemen, is that learning conquers a deeper layer of your life, that which is connected with the great riddle, gentlemen, that the child must become a man and an elder. To learn means to tie for the first time your childhood to your ripe age, whereas reading and listening treat you as you are. Learning always appeals to your divination, to your presage that one day you will have to be alone.

One of my teachers made us read -- made us learn the choruses from a great play by Frederick Schiller, the -- Braut von Messina, The Bride of Messina, in Italy. And it's done -- did I tell the story here, already? And our teacher in German asked us to learn this -- these choruses by heart. And we were a little disgruntled. It was too much. They were very long, these choruses. And very many. And he felt that there was some silent resistance. So he said nothing, and next day -- next time we have the same course, we -- he came to class with a postal card written in Buenos Aires in Argentina, by a young ensign in the navy, in the German navy of that time. And he -- the ensign's card read, "Dear Professor, I am sick in the hospital in Buenos Aires, with a typhoid fever. I'm now re- -- convalescing. And the only comfort in a country in which nobody speaks German has been that I could repeat to myself the choruses of The Bride of Messina, which you kindly made me learn."

And so, of course, the class was very enthused, and we all went and learned the choruses. And I still know them. And I still -- there hasn't been, I think, a year in my life ever since in which the remembrance of these choruses has not given me some bright idea, as for example, for this course. I've learned very much from the chorus of the Braut von Messina for this course, Philosophy 10. I wouldn't if I hadn't learned it by heart, because I would have also thought, as you have -- always do: "Oh, I -- we read this five years ago," with -- always with the implication that because you read it five years ago, you are no longer, you see, can be -- no longer be expected to know anything what was in it. That's your attitude.

Like the famous student of Dartmouth, you know, who came back and met

Mr. {Lambeth}, the great professor of Shakespeare here, on the street, and said, "Professor, how wonderful to meet you."

And Mr. {Lambeth} said, "How do you do? What's the matter? Why are you {so excited}?"

"Oh, yes, I want to know how you made out with Hamlet. We never got beyond the fourth act."

So the professor was expected to read the fifth act, but he hadn't been, you see.

Let's have a break. Five minutes.

[tape interruption]

... things that have also been forgotten about memory, listening -- learning, and playing.

If memory delves into a part of a child's life-substance, which at this moment is not yet active, but it -- which one day will become active, you see all of a sudden that life is not lived on one superficial plane. A man is a -- the secret of man is the endless plasticity, and you must understand that it would be impossible for man to live 70 years if there is not a wavelength on which he lives and travels which is unknown to the day of the child. The seeds, which by listening and by learning are put down, gentlemen, they reach infinitely deeper down than your own will and purpose. The ruin of an education based on spon- -- willful, purposive reading, on this simple, idiotic question put to a 12-year-old boy: do you wish to take a course in English or in mathematics? which -- so -- no boy can answer, because he has had neither English nor did he have mathematics. All this elective business at an age where there is no electivi- -- election, which never should be -- has to do with the idea that a person is i- -- to be identified with his state of consciousness at this moment.

As you know, this has been -- driven people to such madness that now we all speak of the subconscious with a certain awe. Well, you only have to speak of the subconscious after you have overrated the conscious. Children who have to obey orders never have to develop the -- division between the subconscious and the conscious, because their parents, by their commands, have always reached down into the subconscious, and have never overrated that what a child at this moment already can see or understand. That's part of the process. A child must know something of what's going on, but cannot possibly understand everything.

And this is the -- the falsification of life, gentlemen, to which modern educational theory however has driven you, that you think at this moment you know what you are doing. Gentlemen, I don't know what I'm doing. I know something of what I am doing. The real consequences of a man's life, the person who lives that life, never knows this. You see, you can't -- we can't know ourselves. We can only know -- only know each other. Your wife knows -- will know much better at the age of -- when you are 60 what it's all about than you do know yourself. And she'll probably -- if she's wise, won't tell you. And vice versa. You will know about your life -- wife's { }, but that leads too far.

What I want to stress is the -- that the mind is not the enlightened part of us in which the incandescent bulb is all-visible, and the body is the dark part of us in which the passions rest. The mind itself is as dark as it is bright, as complex as it is fertile, as long-range as it is short-range. Don't mistake the thought of this moment with the genius which your mind really should represent in you. That's a tremendous capital. Don't destroy it. Just a man sh- -- a man mustn't take sleeping pills in order to -- not to become an addict, you should not ruin your brain, as you do today, by exposing it, for example, to all these -- this nonsense, the stultifying things to which you do expose it, by going to the movies three times a week. You ruin your brain. You don't care, of course, because you think you put it in, you take it out; to you your brain is something so superficial, that you do not know what you do to it.

I invoke in you not the fear of God -- you don't have that. Not the fear of your parents -- you try to get rid of that. Certainly not the fear of your parents. We are afraid of you. I do invoke the fear, gentlemen, of the the depths of your own being. You are much deeper than you want to be. You want to be superficial, but memory is the proof that you are not, that really there is at this moment in you some plastic substance able to live a hundred years, which is tremendous. Not one person in this country thinks of -- a hundred years ahead.

Gentlemen, you, in the year 2020, will be a grandfather who has the right to tell something to his grandson. This is now prepared, because then you will have great authority over this child. Now you have no authority, fortunately. But in 80 years, when you are 90, or in 70 years, I should say, when you are 90; or in 60 years when you are 80, or in 50 years, when you are 70, people will be inclined to listen to you. Then everything you have done to you now will come to roost. And not before. And there -- I assure you, memory is that sacred part of yours that will at that time come forth and bear fruit, or not bear fruit.

It is utterly indifferent what is in the front of your consciousness at this moment. { } -- I don't care what dirty, or what clear, or what clean, or what nice ideas you have of the world in general. I'm terribly concerned with that

which is planted into you as going to come true in 50 years. It's the only part of you that's interesting to me. What do I care what you think of me? You may think I'm a fool. Please. Go ahead, do this. As long as you listen to what I say, this you will have forgotten in 50 years that you were down on me. But what I have said, if it -- I had said it with conviction and with truthfulness, it will come home. It will come back. You cannot forget it. That's the great power of the truth, you see, that always first the say -- he who says the truth has to be despised and ridiculed, but the thing that is true comes back on you, and tells you once more that you knew this, and you should have known, and you should have remembered it.

The relation, gentlemen -- between the person who tells you the truth -- that is, your teacher -- and the truth is that, that the teacher may get the beating, but don't beat down the truth. And the truth of the matter is that without cultivating your memory, you cannot connect your childishness with your memory.

You see, I see many people. This is now really the -- the real question of hell and Heaven. I know many people who in their youth live paradise and Heaven as made by their parents and teachers, as we have today in this progressive world. Then in -- as -- when they have to earn a living, they dance after the pipe of their boss. I've heard many people in this college defy the president of the United States. I've never heard them defy the president of this college. Everybody in this country takes it for granted that we -- has to have the ideas of the person who pays him. I think it is much more important to criticize the president of this college than the pres- -- criticize the president of the United States, because I know a little bit more about the college than I know about the United States, you know. But it's more courageous. And it's more difficult. President Dickey, you see, might mind very much that I -- that I criticize him. But the president of the United States usually doesn't hear it.

So in -- most people in this country say that the president of the United States is a drunkard, or that he's -- no good. That is the whole habit, you know, in soci- -- here in -- in America. Everybody takes it out on the president. I want you to take it out on your boss, because then you will know when to criticize him and when not to criticize. You will then only criticize when you really know that it is true. If -- as long as you criticize the president of the United States, you will always criticize him for things you do not know. And that's usually done in this country. That you call "democracy." Democracy is the permission to criticize those things which one doesn't understand and to be silent about those things which one should criticize. You know, in a monarchy, it's very different. You cannot criticize the king, but there you can criticize your children. In this country you cannot criticize your children, but you can criticize the president.

How do we do this, gentlemen? This tremendous problem of being born and being created into a world with a wa- -- on a wavelength of 70 years shows you that we are like a tree. We are a tremendous plant whose law of timing is paramount over every one day's seasons, and weather, and climate. As I told you, by discovering that in memory -- memorizing and learning, people are allowed not to live day by day. We become our own ancestors. A child is father to the man inasfar as it learns. Inasfar as it is happy in its youth, it is not father to the man, because it is then -- there is nothing planted for the future. It is just made happy. By ice cream, you cannot grow up. You can only grow up by selection of those things which -- what is to be learned, gentlemen? That which is needed at every age of life, which is the same for a child, for a man, and for a priest, and for a king -- what I call "elder," that for the third generation. The important things of life are important for three generations of your own being. And you discover by learning that you are expected not to be a child, but that you are expected to be at the same time always a child, a man, and an authority, if you'd prefer that word. Every one of us is -- is asked to be all three. Learning is this tremendous tie-up which gives us the courage to stick to your guns through three ages of life. And it's the only way by which you can achieve anything. Nobody can achieve anything on the flat of his own day, one day, you see, of one age. You will not believe a man who cannot show proof that he meant business in the three different ages of his life.

I had started on this, didn't I, when I said I know so many people who obey their boss in the second part of life, and then they obey usually their wife or their children in the third age of life. In other words, most people live on borrowed spirits. What is done in the co- -- business community they say when they are in the Rotary Club. What the choo- -- -- schoolchildren think and believe, they believe when they are in school. And when they are retired and live in Florida, they get -- believe what people at bridge parties usually say then. And I have seen this breaking-up of continuity in a man's soul so often that at college you have certain ideas, and you are pacifists, and you are good. Then you become a junior member of the Chamber of Commerce -- or is it a member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce? I don't know. And -- and then you have all the ideas of a good Republican. And -- and later on then you go abroad and mix with cosmopolitan society perhaps; and you always -- always join, because you have no -- no power to grow your own vineyard, to grow as your own grape, your own wine.

Most people break after college with everything they have held, or dreamt to be true, what they learned in the little red schoolhouse, or from their women teachers; then they go into the strange world, and they suddenly believe all the stories told them -- about their expense account and the government, and pay no taxes, et cetera. And then, as I said, they live always on borrowed convictions,

because, gentlemen, what is a conviction? A conviction is that which develops by learning in your youth, by verifying in your middle age, and by teaching in your old age the same truth. Otherwise there is no conviction, if you don't do all three things. The rest is opinion. The rest is just ideas. Who cares for ideas? Who cares for opinions? I don't. I want to see people who embody the truth, because it has stayed with them in three forms of life.

And now, if you have good parents and good teachers, you can trust them that they will ask you to learn what deserves to be verified. For example, it is a simple sentence: have convictions. Or be -- act as a free man, you see. Never do anything you think is wrong. Well, you have to take this at this moment for granted because you haven't -- no -- don't know what -- what price it costs to do. It fills -- follows such a simple rule. If you have done it once in your life, in your -- as grown-up people, and you c- -- are partly already grown up, you can already enact this, then you know how different it is to know something, or to remember some -- some good ad- -- adage, some good proverb and to do it. And it takes a very different shape in your mind, because you have tried to apply it. And then the third thing is that you have to tell other people whether this is an exception or the rule, whether you should teach it others, or you should warn others against it. Perhaps you tell your children: never follow your conviction, because it is has been so very hurtful for you to do it.

So gentlemen, only those mental things are really essential which reappear in your own youth, in your own mature life, and in your own old age. And I -- we said -- know already, gentlemen, old age sets in as soon as you teach somebody. You are already old inasfar as you teach other people, and you probably do. I mean, you go to Sunday school, you see, whatever you do there. In this sense, old age, youth, and maturity is with everybody who has to learn, who has to do, and who has to speak about what he's doing.

And so we get to a -- I think rock-bottom basis, gentlemen, of which -- for whi- -- what the mind is really given us. The mind is given us for conviction. But only very few -- thoughts, and very few contents reach this degree of density, that they stay with you as children, as men, and as parents, or teachers, or rulers. And you can gauge your own education if you ask yourself: isn't the most you have learned to this day child's food, pablum? Have you really learned difficult things? Things hard to believe? Challenging things which are so selective that they are only for a man who can grow into -- in his own right? Aren't you really all just becoming the typical -- I won't say what. But any man who is typical is a poor, poor second, because to be typical means not to live, but to be lived by other people's minds.

The decision, gentlemen, which is made in -- in your own lifetime at this

moment is: whether you will live by other people's minds or whether you will really have a mind of your own. And you don't have a mind of your own by having ideas. You have a mind of your own if that which you now learn will be so -- appear so real that you will do something about it in your manhood, you see, and you will make other people do something about it in your old age. These are the three phases of the mind, and that it means to have one's own mind.

Now ask yourself how you -- if you are ever prepared to have a mind of your own. You haven't -- you think a mind is somebo- -- something that thinks today something. That's what you call the mind. That isn't the mind. That's a flash. You reflect on something. You hear -- you read an editorial in the New York Times and you think, "The man is, oh, obviously right." Then you read the Herald Tribune and you say, "He's obviously right." And then you read the Post, and you say, "He's obviously right." So you have three opinions in a row, and you do nothing about any one of the three. And that you call your mental processes. You call this a mental process. That's the opposite from a mental process. Gentlemen, a true mental process is a process by which you listen to somebody who says, "Read this," by which you then decide this is so good that you have to learn it by heart and let it wait, let it ride. Let me play, but the day will come when I'm going to do something about it.

So we learn something tremendous, gentlemen, how only these fourth -- four commandments: a real mental process takes on different shapes. At first it is listened to. And then it is read about. And the third is learned. And fourth is forgotten, is allowed to lie fallow, as any good thought. And then the day -- moment comes where we are going to do something about it. This will be the content of the next meeting, this middle command, the command of middle life, gentlemen.

My friend Richard Cabot, let me add this one word, perhaps -- used to call the command of play, with regard to the mental processes, as the command to let the thought incubate. I thought I should mention this to you, incubation. For -- for you this may be more understandable than the word "play." It means exactly, however, the same to allow the thought to reach that moment in which it has to come to the fore. Whether I call it "to play," or whether he calls it, you see, "to let it incubate," it always means that between your becoming conscious of a mental content and your being able to do something about it, there always will be some time.

All the thoughts which you call "exciting" and "stimulating" usually are useless. Never go to a stimulating lecture, gentlemen. You are overstimulated. Nothing can stimulate you anymore. It's a curse of this country that it is a recommendation that -- when a man -- speaker is called "stimulating." That's the

devil. If a man makes you so patient that what he says will stay with you and you will -- you -- for the -- for nothing, because you are sure it's so important that you must wait when you can do something about it, then he hasn't stimulated you, but he has sown something. And you, by your dauer- -- permanent stimulation, you are perfectly unable to receive any mental seed. You decline, because you actually have told me, all your comrades, that if you do not understand it at the very moment and cannot contradict me at the very moment, then it is nothing.

Gentlemen, anything you can at this moment already do something about it, isn't worth learning, obviously. It's fruitless, senseless. That which you can contradict or verify at this moment -- that I -- for this you don't have to have special institutions of learning. This is done on the street, these things of immediate { }, you see. For this, I wouldn't have to be a professor of philosophy, and you wouldn't have to enroll in Dartmouth College. Can you see this? That's too cheap. But you have made this college a playground. You treat our knowledge and our convictions and everything we tell you as something -- to -- immediately criticized and thrown away, or contradicted, or approved of.

If I depend on your approval at this moment, gentlemen, I'm lost. Well, don't you see this? You also cannot depend on my approval. That's why I cannot hamper your life. I can flunk you in the exam, but what does it matter? We are not in a state, you see, of such contents where I have the right to judge your future, but you have not the right to judge the whole human past which I represent here to you. I must give you 10, 20, 30 years to do something -- you see, to find out what -- if what I say is true. That's why I need the authority of this college to be appointed. They find out who has something to say that is worthwhile listening to. Th- -- tha- -- the authorities of the college must know this. You cannot know.

And this is the great decision of the Eisenhower era, as I see it, that the people of this country, who -- not very well -- much knowing what all -- it's all about felt that they had to restore their whole system of the mental processes, because we no longer can live on the next news. Everything we do now, gentlemen, will only bear fruit 50 years from now.

So, in 50 years.