Keep Moving from This Mountain (by Martin Luther King, Jr.)

photo by Dick DeMarsico, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Keep Moving from This Mountain
by Martin Luther King, Jr.
[a sermon delivered at Temple Israel of Hollywood on 26 February 1965]

Rabbi Nussbaum, officers and members of this great congregation,
ladies and gentlemen: I need not pause to say how very delighted and
honored I am to have the privilege of being here this evening and of
being a part of this very meaningful and significant worship service. I
want to express my profound and sincere gratitude to your distinguished
rabbi for extending the invitation and giving me the opportunity to
share these moments of fellowship with you. It is always a rich and
rewarding experience when I can take a brief break from the day-to-day
demands of our struggle for freedom and human dignity in the South and
discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned people of
goodwill all over this nation. And so I can assure you that I’m happy
to be with you and I consider you real friends of our struggle. And I
want to thank you for your support; our struggle is often difficult and
frustrating. It has its dark and desolate moments. But we are often
given new courage and vigor to carry on when we know that there are
friends of goodwill in the background who are supporting us and we feel
this day in and day out. And so I want to thank you in advance for your
prayers, for your concern, for your moral support, and also for your
financial support. I can assure you that this financial support will go
a long, long way in helping us to continue in our humble efforts to
make the American dream a reality.

Tonight I would like to have you think with me from the subject,
Keep Moving from this Mountain. I would like to take your minds back
many, many centuries into a familiar experience so significantly
recorded in the sacred Scriptures. The Children of Israel had been
reduced into the bondage of physical slavery. Throughout slavery they
were things to be used, not persons to be respected. Throughout
slavery, they were trampled over by the iron feet of oppression; they
were exploited economically, dominated politically, and humiliated on
every hand. But then God sent Moses to lead the Children of Israel from
the dark and difficult period of Egypt’s slavery into a bright and
better day. Moses stood up over and over again in Pharaoh’s court and
cried out, “Let my people go!” Pharaoh with a hardened heart refused
over and over again. But then came that glad day when the Red Sea
opened and God’s children were able to leave the darkness of Egypt and
move on to the other side. But as soon as they got out of Egypt they
discovered that before they could get to the Promised Land there was a
difficult, trying wilderness ahead. They had to realize that before
they could get to the Promised Land, they had to face gigantic
mountains and prodigious hilltops. And so, as a result of this
realization, three groups of people emerged. One group said in
substance that “We would rather go back to Egypt.” They preferred the
flush parts of Egypt to the challenges of the Promised Land. A second
group that abhorred the idea of going back to Egypt, and yet they
abhorred the idea of facing the difficulties of moving ahead to the
Promised Land and they somehow wanted to remain stationary and choose
the line of least resistance. There was a third group, probably
influenced by Caleb and Joshua who had gone over to spy a bit and who
admitted that there were giants in the land but who said, “We can
possess the land.” This group said in substance that “We will go on in
spite of…,” that “We will not allow anything to stop us,” that “We
will move on amid the difficulties, amid the trials, amid the
tribulations.”

Now certainly, one could almost preach a sermon from either of these
groups. This evening I want to deal mainly with the second group: those
individuals that chose the line of least resistance, those individuals
who didn’t want to go back to Egypt but who did not quite have the
strength to move on to the Promised Land. These are probably the people
who wanted to remain stationary. These are the people who probably
wanted to stop at a particular point and remain right there in the
wilderness. God speaks through Moses to these people. The first chapter
of the book of Deuteronomy said, “Ye have been in this mountain long
enough. Turn you and take your journey and go to the mount of the
Amorites.” In other words, God was saying through Moses that you must
not allow yourself to get bogged down with unattained goals. You must
not allow yourself to get caught up in impeding mountains. Whenever God
speaks, he says, “Go forward.” Whenever God speaks, he says, “Move on
from mountains of stagnant complacency and deadening pacifity.” So this
is the great challenge that always stands before men. In some real
sense, we are all moving toward some “promised land” of personal and
collective fulfillment. In every age and every generation, men have
envisioned a promised land. Some may have envisioned it with the wrong
ideology, with the wrong philosophical presupposition. But men in every
generation thought in terms of some promised land. Plato and his
Republic thought of it of a day — as a day when philosophers would
become kings and kings philosophers, and justice would reign throughout
society. Emanuel Kant thought of it as a day when men would recognize
the moral laws of the universe and the categorical imperative would
reign supreme. Karl Marx dreamed of it as a day when the proletariat
would conquer the reign of the bourgeoisie and so society would live by
the motto “from each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs.” Judaism and Christianity dreamed of it as a day when the
Kingdom of God would emerge; a day when justice, brotherhood, peace,
and the reign and will of God would dwell throughout society. Whenever
men have thought seriously of life, they have dreamed of a promised
land, and so in a sense we are all moving toward some promised land.

Tonight I would like to suggest some of the symbolic mountains that
we have occupied long enough and that we must leave if we are to move
on to the promised land of justice, peace, and brotherhood. Yea, the
promised land of the kingdom of God. First, we’ve been in the mountain
of practical materialism long enough. And when I speak of materialism
at this point, I’m not talking about metaphysical materialism — that
strange doctrine that speaks of all of reality is little more than
matter in motion, that strange doctrine that says in substance that all
life is merely a physiological process with a physiological meaning.
I’m not talking about that kind of materialism because I think
ultimately it is blown away by the wind of essential thinking. I’m
talking about practical materialism — the notion that causes
individuals to live as if material values are the only values and
concerns in life. Each of us lives in two realms, the “within” and the
“without.” The within of our lives is somehow found in the realm of
ends, the without in the realm of means. The within of our [lives], the
bottom — that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature,
morals, and religion for which at best we live. The without of our
lives is that realm of instrumentalities, techniques, mechanisms by
which we live. Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy
of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb
the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we
allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we
live. And how much of our modern life can be summarized in that
arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau, “Improved means to an unimproved
end?” We have allowed our civilization to outrun our culture; we have
allowed our technology to outdistance our theology and for this reason
we find ourselves caught up with many problems. Through our scientific
genius we made of the world a neighborhood, but we failed through moral
commitment to make of it a brotherhood, and so we’ve ended up with
guided missiles and misguided men. And the great challenge is to move
out of the mountain of practical materialism and move on to another and
higher mountain which recognizes somehow that we must live by and
toward the basic ends of life. We must move on to that mountain which
says in substance, “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world
of means — airplanes, televisions, electric lights — and lose the
end: the soul?”

Now the other mountain that we’ve occupied long enough, and
certainly it is quite relevant to discuss this at this time when we
think of brotherhood — we’ve been in the mountain of racial injustice
long enough. And now it is time for us to move on to that great and
noble realm of justice and brotherhood. That is the great struggle
taking place in our nation today. It isn’t a struggle just based on a
lot of noise; it is a struggle to save the soul of our nation for no
nation can rise to its full moral maturity so long as it subjects a
segment of its citizenry on the basis of race or color. And somehow we
must come to see more than ever before that racial injustice is a
cancer in the body politic which must be removed before our moral
health can be realized. Racial segregation must be seen for what it is
— and that is an evil system, a new form of slavery covered up with
certain niceties of complexity. Segregation is wrong, whether it is in
public schools, whether it is in housing, whether it is in recreational
facilities, whether it is in any area of life. It is an evil which we
must work to get rid of with all of the determination and all of the
zeal that we can muster. Segregation is evil because it relegates
persons to the status of things. Somewhere the theologian Paul Tillich
had said that “sin is separation.” What is segregation but an
existential expression of man’s tragic estrangement, his awful
separation, his terrible sinfulness? Somehow we must work, labor, and
struggle until every vestige of segregation is removed from our society.

I remember some time ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great
country known as India and we had some marvelous experiences. They will
remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen. I
remember one afternoon that we journeyed down to the southern most
point of India in the state of Kerala. And I was to address that
afternoon some high school students who were the children mainly of
parents who had been “untouchables.” And I remember that afternoon that
the principal went through his introduction and when he came to the end
he said, “I’m happy to present to you, students, a fellow untouchable
from the United States of America,” and for the moment I was peeved and
shocked that he would introduce me as an untouchable, but pretty soon
my mind leaped the Atlantic and I started thinking about conditions
back home. And I started thinking about the fact that I could not go in
to most places of public accommodation all across the South. I started
thinking about the fact that 20 million of my black brothers and
sisters were still at the bottom of the economic ladder. I started
thinking about the fact that Negroes all over America, even if they
have the money can not buy homes and rent homes of their choices
because so many of their white brothers don’t want to live near them. I
started thinking about the fact that my little children were still
judged in terms of the color of their skin rather than the content of
their character. And I said to myself, “I am an untouchable and every
Negro in the United States is an untouchable.” And segregation is evil
because it stigmatizes the segregated as an untouchable in a caste
system. We’ve been in the mountain of segregation long enough and it is
time for all men of goodwill to say now, “We are through with
segregation now, henceforth, and forever more.”

We’ve been in the mountain of indifference concerning poverty long
enough. Whether we realize it or not, most of the peoples of the world
still go to bed hungry at night. Millions of them are in Asia, millions
in Africa, millions in South America. On that same trip to India I will
never forget the depressing moments that came to me. How can one avoid
being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of
people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed
when he sees with his own eyes millions of people sleeping on the
sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on the
sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than 600,000 sleep on the
sidewalks every night. They have no beds to go in; they have no houses
to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out
of India’s population of more than 400 million people, some 380 million
make an annual income of less than 70 dollars a year? Most of these
people have never seen a doctor or a dentist. The world must do
something about this. The affluent nations, the “have” nations must
join in the grand alliance to do something about this. And not only
must we look abroad, we can look in our own nation. We will discover
that there are some 10 million families that are considered poverty
stricken families. These families have an average of four or five
members, which means there are some 40 — between 40 and 50 million of
our brothers and sisters in this country who are poverty stricken.
There they find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in
the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. And certainly if we
are to be a great nation, we must solve this problem. Now there is
nothing new about poverty. What is new that we now have the techniques
and the resources to get rid of it.

Some years ago a thoughtful Englishman by the name of Malthus
frightened the world by discussing the problem — the joint problem of
production and population. He reached the conclusion in a book that the
world was moving toward universal famine because man’s population —
the population rather, was outrunning man’s capacity to produce. But it
didn’t take many years after that for many other people to reveal that
Malthus was wrong, that he grossly underestimated the resources of the
world and the resourcefulness of man. It was Dr. Kirtley Mather, a
Harvard geologist a few years ago who wrote a book entitled Enough and
to Spare. He said in substance throughout that book that there is
enough and to spare in this world for all men to have the basic
necessities of life. It boils down to the question of whether men and
women in this nation are willing to be concerned about the least of
these. A great nation is a compassionate nation. Who are the least of
these? The least of these are those who still find themselves
smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in an affluent society. Who
are the least of these? They are the thousands of individuals who see
life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. Who are the
least of these? They are the little boys and little girls who grow up
with clouds of inferiority floating in their little mental skies
because they know that they are caught in conditions of economic
depravation. Who are the least of these? They are the individuals who
are caught in the fatigue of despair. And somehow if we are to be a
great nation, we must be concerned about the least of these, our
brothers. And we’ve been in the mountain of indifference too long and
ultimately we must be concerned about the least of these; we must be
concerned about the poverty-stricken because our destinies are tied
together. And somehow in the final analysis, as long as there is
poverty in the world, nobody can be totally rich. We are all caught in
an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of
destiny. And what affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some
strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what
you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am
what I ought to be. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in
graphic terms, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a
piece of the continent, a part of the main.” And he goes on toward the
end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in
mankind. And therefore never sin to know for whom the bell tolls, it
tolls for thee.” And when we see this, we will move out of the mountain
of indifference concerning poverty.

There is another mountain that we’ve been in long enough. It is a
mountain of violence and hatred. I’m more convinced than ever before
that violence can not solve the problems of the world. Violence is both
impractical and immoral. This is why I’ve tried in my little way to
teach it in our struggle for racial justice that I’ve come to see and I
believe with all my heart that we can not make the great moral
contribution to our nation that we should make, and we can not win the
battle for justice if we stoop to the point of using violence in our
struggle. And it is my basic feeling that if the Negro succumbs to the
temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn
generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of
bitterness and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign
of meaningless chaos. Violence is not the way. There is still a voice
crying through the vista of time, saying, “He who lives by the sword
will perish by the sword.” And history is cluttered with the wreckage
of nations. History is filled with the bleached bones of communities
that failed to follow this command. And the same thing applies to love.
This is no longer an idea that we can afford to ignore over the world.
Love is basic for the very survival of mankind. I’m convinced that love
is the only absolute ultimately; love is the highest good. He who loves
has somehow discovered the meaning of ultimate reality. He who hates
does not know God; he who hates has no knowledge of God. Love is the
supreme unifying principle of life. Psychiatrists are telling us now
that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscience
[subconscious], many of the inner conflicts are rooted in hate, and
they are now saying “Love or perish.” Oh, how basic this is. It rings
down across the centuries: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
with all thy soul, with all thy strength, with all thy mind, and thy
neighbor as thyself. We’ve been in the mountain of violence and hatred
too long. And this not only applies in the struggle to achieve racial
justice. We’ve got to move on to the point of seeing that on the
international scale, war is obsolete — that it must somehow be cast
into unending limbo. But in a day when Sputniks and Explorers are
dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving
highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It
is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either
nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the
alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative
to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole
world may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of
annihilation. And so we must rise up and beat our swords into
plowshares, and our spears into pruning hooks and nations must not rise
up against nations, neither must they study war anymore. We’ve been in
the mountain of war. We’ve been in the mountain of violence. We’ve been
in the mountain of hatred long enough. It is necessary to move on now,
but only by moving out of this mountain can we move to the promised
land of justice and brotherhood and the Kingdom of God. It all boils
down to the fact that we must never allow ourselves to become satisfied
with unattained goals. We must always maintain a kind of divine
discontent.

There are certain technical words within every academic discipline
which soon become stereotypes and clichés. Every academic discipline
has its technical nomenclature. Modern psychology has a word that is
probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word
“maladjusted.” Certainly we all want to live the well adjusted life in
order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But I must
honestly say to you tonight my friends that there are some things in
our world, there are some things in our nation to which I’m proud to be
maladjusted, to which I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted
until the good society is realized. I must honestly say to you that I
never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I
never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to
adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from
the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself
to the madness of militarism and the self defeating effects of physical
violence. And I say to you that I am absolutely convinced that maybe
the world is in need for the formation of a new organization: “The
International Association for the Advancement of Creative
Maladjustment” — men and women who will be as maladjusted as the
prophet Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day would cry
out in words that echo across the centuries: “Let justice roll down
like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream;” as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson
who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery would etch
across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions: “We
hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights
and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;”
as maladjusted as Jesus
of Nazareth that said to the men and women of his day: “Love your
enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use
you.” And through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from the
bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright
and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

And may I say in conclusion that I believe firmly that we will get
to the promised land of collective fulfillment. I still believe that
right here in America we will reach the promised land of brotherhood.
Oh, I know that there are still dark and difficult days ahead. Before
we get there some more of us will have to get scarred up a bit. Before
we reach that majestic land some more will be called bad names. Some
will be called reds and communists simply because they believe in the
brotherhood of man. Before we get there some more will have to be
thrown into crowded, frustrating, and depressing jail cells. Before we
get there maybe somebody else like a Medgar Evers and the three civil
rights workers in Mississippi this summer will have to face physical
death. If physical death is the price that some must pay to free their
children and their white brothers from a permanent death of the spirit,
then nothing can be more redemptive. Yes, we were singing about it just
a few minutes ago: “We shall overcome; we shall overcome, deep in my
heart I do believe we shall overcome.” And I believe it because somehow
the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. We
shall overcome because Carlyle is right: “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell
is right: “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.
Yet, that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth
God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.” With this faith we
will be able to hue out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of
our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we
will be able to speed up the day. And in the words of prophecy, “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This will be a great day. This will be a marvelous hour. And at that moment, figuratively speaking in biblical words: “the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy.”

Advertisements

Facing Life Fearlessly (by Clarence Darrow)

 
Facing Life Fearlessly
 
by Clarence Darrow

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD, KANSAS

(Report of a lecture delivered at the University of Chicago, under the auspices of the Poetry Club, and the Liberal Club; revised by Mr. Darrow.)

I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mr. A.E. Housman in the Summer of 1927. I spent two hours with him, and before that I had been to the home of Thomas Hardy. Mr. Hardy told me how much he thought of Housman, before I visited Housman; and Housman was a frequent visitor at the Hardy home. Their ideas of life were very much alike; they were what the orthodox people and the Rotary Clubs would call pessimistic. They didn’t live on pipe dreams; they took the universe as they found it, and man as they found him. They tried to see what beauty there was in each of them, but didn’t close their eyes to the misery and maladjustments of either the universe or man, because they ware realists, honest, thorough, and fearless.

Hardy himself had received the censure of all the good people of England and the world, who, in spite of that, bought his books. They all condemned him when he wrote his ‘Tess;’ so he determined not to write any more prose. He thought that people probably were not intelligent enough to appreciate him; certainly not his viewpoint, and he didn’t wish to waste his time on them.

Housman’s viewpoint is much the same, as all of you know. He has written very little. You can read all he has written in two hours, and less than that; but everything is exquisitely finished. met him he was in his study in Cambridge. He is a professor of Latin. I can’t Imagine anythINg more useless than that — unless it be Greek! He has been called the greatest Latin scholar in the world, and he seemed to take some pride in his Latin; not so much in his poetry. He said he didn’t write poetry except when he felt he had to, it was always hard work for him, although some of the things he wrote very quickly; but as a rule he spent a great deal of time on most of them.

I asked him if it was true that the latest little volume was what it is entitled — ‘Last Poems.’ He said he thought it was true; that it had been published as his last poems in 1922 — five years before — and he had only written four lines since: so he thought that would probably be the last. Upon my asking him to recite the four lines, he said he had forgotten them.

Both Hardy and Housman, and of course Omar, believed that man is rather small in comparison with the universe, or even with the earth; they didn’t believe in human responsibility, in free will, in a purposeful universe, in a Being who watched over and cared for the people of the world. It is evident that if He does, He makes a poor job of It!

Neither Hardy nor Housman had any such delusions. They took the world as they found it and never tried to guess at its origin. They took man as they found him and didn’t try to build castles for him after be was dead. They were essentially realists, both of them; and of course long before them Omar had gone over the same field.

It is hardly fair to call the Rubaiyat the work of Omar Khayyam. I have read a good many different editions and several different versions. I never read it in Persian, in which it was first written, but I have read not only poetical versions but prose ones. Justin McCarthy brought out a translation a number of years ago which was supposed to be a literal translation of Omar’s book. There is no resemblance between that book and the classic under his name that was really written by FitzGerald. There is nothing very remarkable about the Omar Khayyam as found in Justin McCarthy’s translation. It is probably ten times as expansive as the one we have, and no one would recognize it from the FitzGerald edition.

The beauty of the Rubaiyat is Edward FitzGerald’s. He evidently was more or less modest or else he wanted to do great homage to Omar, because no one would ever have suspected that Omar had any more to do with the book than they would have suspected Plato. But, under the magic touch of FitzGerald, it is not only one of the wisest and most profound pieces of literature in the world, but one of the most beautiful productions that the world has ever known.

I remember reading somewhere that when this poem was thrown on the market in London, a long time ago, nobody bought it. They finally put it out in front of the shop in the form in which it was printed and sold it for a penny. One could make more money by buying those books at a penny and selling them now than he could make with a large block of Standard Oil! It took a long while for Omar and FitzGerald to gain recognition, which makes it rather comfortable for the rest of us who write books to give away, and feel happy when somebody asks us for one, although we suspect they will never read them. But we all think we will be discovered sometime. Some of us hope so and some are fearful that they will be. Neither Omar nor FitzGerald believed in human responsibility. That is the rock on which most religions are founded, and all laws — that everybody is responsible for his conduct; that if he is good he is good because he deliberately chooses to be good, and if he is bad it is pure cussedness on his part — nobody had anything to do with it excepting himself. If he hasn’t free will, why, he isn’t anything! The English poet Henley, in one of his poems, probably expressed this about as well as anybody. It looks to me as if he had a case of the rabies or something like that. But people are fond of repeating it. In his brief poem about Fate he says:

I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.

A fine captain of his soul; and a fine master of his fate! He wasn’t master enough of his fate to get himself born, which is rather important, nor to do much of anything else, except brag about it. Instead of being the captain of his soul, as I have sometimes expressed it, man isn’t even a deck-hand on a rudderless ship! He is just floating around and trying to hang on, and hanging on as long as he can. But if it does him any good to repeat Henley, or other nonsense, it is all right to give him a chance to do it, because he hasn’t much to look forward to, any way. Free will never was a scientific doctrine; it never can be. It is probably a religious conception, which of course shows that it isn’t a scientific one.

Neither one of these eminent men, Hardy or Housman, believed anything in free will. There is eight hundred years between Omar and Housman, and yet their, philosophy is wondrously alike. I have no doubt but that Omar’s philosophy was very like what we find in the rendering of FitzGerald. It is not a strange and unusual philosophy, except in churches and Rotary Clubs and places like that. It is not strange in places where people think or try to, and where they do not undertake to fool themselves. It is rather a common philosophy; it is a common philosophy where people have any realization of their own importance, or, rather, unimportance. A realization of it almost invariably forces upon a human being his own insignificance and the insignificance of all the other human atoms that come and go.

Men’s ideas root pretty far back. Their religious creeds are very old. By means of interest and hope and largely fear, they manage to hang on to the old, even when they know it is not true. The idea of man’s importance came in the early history of the human race. He looked out on the earth, and of course he thought it was flat! It looks flat, and he thought it was. He saw the sun, and he formed the conception that somebody moved it out every morning and pulled it back in at night. He saw the moon, and he had the opinion that somebody pulled that out at sundown and took it in in the morning. He saw the stars, and all there was about the stars was, “He made the stars also.” They were just “also.” They were close by, and they were purely for man to look at, about like diamonds in the shirt bosoms of people who like them.

This was not an unreasonable idea, considering what they had to go on. The people who still believe it have no more to go on. Blind men can’t be taught to see or deaf people to hear. The primitive people thought that the stars were right near by and just the size they seemed to be. Of course now we know that some of them are so far away that light traveling at nearly 286,000 miles a second is several million light years getting to the earth, and some of them are so large that our sun, even, would be a fly-speck to them. The larger the telescopes the more of them we see, and the imagination can’t compass the end of them. It is just humanly possible that somewhere amongst the infinite number of infinitely larger and more important specks of mud in the universe there might be some organisms of matter that are just as intelligent as our people on the earth. So to have the idea that all of this was made for man gives man a great deal of what Weber and Field used to call “Proud flesh.”

Man can’t get conceited from what he knows today, and he can’t get it from what intellectual people ever knew. You remember, in those days the firmament was put in to divide the water below from the water above. They didn’t know exactly what it was made of, but they knew what it was. Heaven was up above the firmament. They knew what it was, because Jacob had seen the angels going up and down on a ladder. Of course, a ladder was the only transportation for such purposes known to Jacob. If he had been dreaming now, they would have been going up in a flying machine and coming down in the same way.

Our conceptions of things root back; and that, of course, is the reason for our crude religions, our crude laws, our crude ideas, and our exalted opinion of the human race.

Omar had it nearer right. He didn’t much overestimate the human race. He knew it for what it was, and that wasn’t much. He knew about what its power was; he didn’t expect much from the human race. He didn’t condemn men, because he knew he couldn’t do any better. As he puts it.

But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-Board of Nights and Days:
Hither and thither moves, and checks and slays
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

Compare that conception with Mr. Henley’s, with his glorious boast that he is the captain of his soul and the master of his fate. Anyone who didn’t catch that idea from the ordinary thought of the community, but carved it out for himself, would be a subject for psychopathic analysis and examination. When you have an idea that everybody else has, of course you are not crazy, but if you have silly ideas that nobody else has, of course you are crazy. That is the only way to settle it.

Most people believe every day many things for which others are sent to the insane asylum. The insane asylums are full of religious exaltants who have just varied a little bit from the standard of foolishness. It isn’t the foolishness that places them in the bug- house, it is the slight variations from the other fellows’ foolishness — that is all. If a man says he is living with the spirits today, he is insane. If he says that Jacob did, he is all right. That is the only difference.

Omar says we are simply “impotent pieces in the game He plays” — of course, he uses a capital letter when he spells, He which is all right enough for the purpose — “in the game He plays upon this chequer-board of nights and days.” And that is what man is. If one could vision somebody playing a game with human pawns, one would think that everyone who is moved around here and there was moved simply at the will of a player and he had nothing whatever to do with the game, any more than any other pawn. And he has nothing more to do with it than any other pawn.

Omar expresses this opinion over and over again. He doesn’t blame man; he knows the weakness of man. He knew the cruelty of judging him.

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Whatever the impulse calls one to do, whatever the baubles or the baits that set in motion many acts, however quickly or emotionally, the consequences of the acts, as far as he is concerned, never end. All your piety and all your wit cannot wipe out a word of it! Omar pities man; he doesn’t exalt God, but he pities man. He sees what man can do; and, more important still, he sees what he cannot do. He condemns the idea that God could or should judge man. The injustice of it, the foolishness of it all, appeals to him and he puts it in this way:

O Thou who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in.
Thou wilt not with Predestin’d Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!

Nothing ever braver and stronger and truer than that! Preachers have wasted their time and their strength and such intelligence and learning as they can command, talking about God forgiving man, as if it was possible for man to hurt God, as if there was anything to be forgiven from man’s standpoint. They pray that man be forgiven and urge that man should be forgiven. Nobody knows for what, but still it has been their constant theme. Poets have done it; Omar knew better. Brave and strong and clear and far- seeing, although living and dying eight hundred years ago. This is what he says about forgiveness:

0 thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev’n with Paradise devised the Snake:
For all the sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d — Man’s forgiveness give — and take!

“Man’s forgiveness give — and take!” If man could afford to forgive God, He ought to be willing to forgive man. Omar knew it. “Ev’n with paradise devised the snake.” Taking the orthodox theory, for all the sin with which the earth is blackened, “Man’s forgiveness give — and take!” That is courage; it is science. It is sense, and it isn’t the weak, cowardly whining of somebody who is afraid he might be hurt unless he whines and supplicates, which he always does, simply hoping that some great power will have compassion on him. Always cowardice and fear, and nothing else!

Omar was wise enough to know that if there was any agency responsible for it, that agency was responsible. He made us as we are, and as He wished to make us, and to say that a weak, puny, ignorant human being, here today and gone tomorrow, could possibly injure God or be responsible for his own weakness and his ignorance, of course is a travesty upon all logic; and of course it does great credit to all superstition, for it couldn’t come any other way.

Housman is equally sure about this. He knows about the responsibility of man. Strange how wonderfully alike runs their philosophy! Housman condemned nobody. No pessimist does — only good optimists. People who believe in a universe of law never condemn or hate individuals. Only those who enthrone man believe in free will, and make him responsible for the terrible crudities of Nature and the force back of it, if there is such a force. Only they are cruel to the limit.

One can get Housman’s idea of the responsibility of the human being from his beautiful little poem, “The Culprit,” the plaintive wailing of a boy to be executed the next morning, when he, in his blindness and terror, asked himself the question, “Why is it and what does it all mean?” and thought about the forces that made him, and what a blind path he traveled, as we all do. He says:

The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.


The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,
For all the pain I cost her,
That she had borne the lad
That borne she had.


My mother and my father
Out of the light they lie;
The warrant would not find them,
And here ’tis only I
Shall hang on high.


Oh let no man remember
The soul that God forgot
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot,
And I will rot.


For so the game is ended
That should not have begun.
My father and my mother
They have a likely son,
And I have none.

Nobody lives in this world to himself or any part of himself. Nobody fashions his body, and still less is responsible for the size or the fineness of his brain and the sensitiveness of his nervous system. No one has anything to do with the infinite manifestations of the human body that produce the emotions, that force men here and there. And yet religion in its cruelty and its brutality brands them all alike. And the religious teachers are so conscious of their own guilt that they only seek to escape punishment by loading their punishment onto someone else. They say that the responsibility of the individual who in his weakness goes his way is so great and his crimes are so large that there isn’t a possibility for him to be saved by his own works.

---

The law is only the slightest bit more intelligent. No matter who does it, or what it is, the individual is responsible. If he is manifestly and obviously crazy they may make some distinction; but no lawyer is wise enough to look into the human mind and know what it means. The interpretations of the human judges were delivered before we had any science on the subject whatever, and they continue to enforce the old ideas of insanity, in spite of the fact that there isn’t an intelligent human being in the world who has studied the question who ever thinks of it in legal terms. Judges instruct the jury that if a man knows the difference between right and wrong he cannot be considered insane. And yet an insane man knows the difference better than an intelligent man, because he has not the intelligence and the learning to know that this is one of the hardest things to determine, and perhaps the most impossible. You can ask the inmates of any insane asylum whether it is right to steal, lie, or kill, and they will all say “No,” just as little children will say it, because they have been taught it. It furnishes no test, but still lawyers and Judges persist in it, to give themselves an excuse to wreak vengeance upon unfortunate people.

Housman knew better. He knew that in every human being is the imprint of all that has gone before, especially the imprint of his direct ancestors. And not only that, but that it is the imprint of all the environment in which he has lived, and that human responsibility is utterly unscientific, and besides that, horribly cruel.

Another thing that impressed itself upon all these poets alike was the futility of life. I don’t know whether a college succeeds in making pupils think that they are very important in the scheme of the universe. I used to be taught that we were all very important. Most all the boys and girls who were taught it when I was taught it are dead, and the world is going on just the same. I have a sort of feeling that after I am dead it will go on just the same, and there are quite a considerable number of people who think it will go on better. But it won’t; I haven’t been important enough even to harm it. It will go on just exactly the same.

We are always told of the importance of the human being and the importance of everything he does; the importance of his not enjoying life, because if he is happy here of course he can’t be happy hereafter, and if he is miserable here he must be happy hereafter. Omar made short work of that, of those promises which are not underwritten, at least not by any responsible people. He did not believe in foregoing what little there is of life in the hope of having a better time hereafter.

He says, “Ah, take the Cash and let the Credit go.” Good advice that: “Ah, take the Cash and let the Credit go.” If you take the “Credit,” likely as not you will miss your fun both here and hereafter. Omar knew better.

It is strange how the religious creeds have hammered that idea into the human mind. They have always felt there was a kinship between pleasure and sin. A smile on the face is complete evidence of wickedness. A solemn, uninteresting countenance is a stamp of virtue and goodness, of self-denial, that will surely be rewarded. Of course, the religious people are strangely hedonistic without knowing it! There are some of us who think that the goodness or badness of an act in this world can be determined only by pain and pleasure units. The thing that brings pleasure is good, and the thing that brings pain is bad. There is no other way to determine the difference between good and bad. Some of us think so: I think so.

Of coarse, the other class roll their eyes and declaim against this heathen philosophy, the idea that pain and pleasure have anything to do with the worth-whileness of existence. It isn’t important for you to be happy here. But why not? You are too miserable here so you will be happy hereafter; and the hereafter is long and the here is short. They promise a much bigger prize than the pagan for the reward of conduct. They simply want you to trust them. They take the pain and pleasure theory with a vengeance, but they do business purely on credit. They are dealers in futures! I could never understand, if it was admissible to have joy in heaven, why you couldn’t have it here, too. And if joy is admissible at all, the quicker you get at it the better, and the surer you are of the result. Omar thought that: “Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go!” Take the Cash and let the other fellow have the Credit! That was his philosophy, and I insist it is much better, and more intelligent philosophy than the other.

But Omar had no delusions about how important this human being is. He had no delusions about the mind, about man’s greatness. He knew something about philosophy or metaphysics, whatever it is. He knew the uncertainty of human calculations, no matter who arrived at them. He knew the round-about way that people try to find out something, and he knew the results. He knew the futility of all of it.

Myself When young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.

That is what Omar thought. Man evermore came out by the same door where in he went. Therefore, “take the Cash and let the Credit go!”‘ He put it even stronger than this. He knew exactly what these values were worth, if anything. He knew what a little bit there is to the whole bag of tricks. What’s the difference whether you were born 75 years ago, or fifty or twenty-five? what’s the difference whether you are going to live ten years, or twenty or thirty, or weather you are already dead? In that case you escape something! This magnifying the importance of the human being is one of the chief sins of man and results in all kinds of cruelty.

If we took the human race for what it is worth, we could not be so cruel. Omar Khayyam knew what it was, this life, that we talk so much about:

‘Tis but a Tent where takes his one day’s rest
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
The Sultan rises, and the dark Forrash
Strikes, and prepares it for another Guest.

“Tis but a Tent where takes his one day’s rest” — is there anything else, if one could just make a survey of the human being, passing across the stage of life? I suppose man has been upon the earth for over a million years. A million years, and perhaps his generations may be thirty to thirty-five years long. Think of the generations in a thousand years, in 5,000 years, in a hundred thousand, in a million years! There are a billion and a half of these important organisms on the earth at any one time. All of them, all important — kings, priests and professors, and doctors and lawyers and presidents, and 100 per cent Americans, and everything on earth you could think of — Ku Kluxers, W.C.T.U.’s, Knights of Columbus and Masons, everything. All of them important in this scheme of things! All of them seeking to attract attention to themselves, and not even satisfied when they get it!

What is it all about? it is strange what little things will interest the human mind — baseball games, fluctuations of the stock market, revivals, foot races, hangings, Anything will interest them. And the wonderful importance of the human being!

Housman knew the importance just as well as Omar. He has something to say about it, too. He knew it was just practically nothing. Strangely like him! The little affairs of life, the little foolishnesses of life, the things that consume our lives without any result whatever; he knew them and knew what they were worth. He knew they were worth practically nothing. But we do them; the urge of living keeps us doing them, even when we know how useless and foolish they are. Housman understood them:

Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I.
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.


Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.

That is what life is, rising in the morning and washing and dressing and going to recitations and studying and forgetting it, and then going to bed at night, to get up the next morning and wash and dress and go to recitation, and so on, world without end.

One might get a focus on it from the flies. They are very busy buzzing round. You don’t exactly know what they are saying, because we can’t understand fly language. Professors can’t teach you fly language! We can’t tell what they are saying, but they are probably talking about the importance of being good, about what’s going to happen to their souls and, when. And when they are stiff in the morning in the Autumn and can hardly move round, the housewife gets up and builds the fire, and the heat limbers them up. She sets out the bread and butter on the table. The flies come down and get into it, and they think the housewife is working for them. Why not?

Is there any difference? Only in the length of the agony. What other? Apparently they have a good time while the sun is shining, and apparently they die when they get cold. It is a proposition of life and death, forms of matter clothed with what seems to be consciousness, and then going back again into inert matter, and that is all. There isn’t any manifestation that we humans make that we do not see in flies and in other forms of matter.

Housman understands it; they have all understood it. Read any of the great authors of the world — any of them; their hopes and their fears and their queries and their doubt, are, about the same. There is only one man I know of that can answer everything, and that is Dr Cadman.

Housman saw it. He knew a little of the difference between age and youth — and there is some. The trouble is, the old men always write the books; they write them not in the way they felt when they were young, but in the way they feel now. And they preach to the young, and condemn them for doing what they themselves did when they had the emotion to do it. Great teachers, when they grow old! Perhaps it is partly envy and the desire that no one shall have anything they can’t have. Likely it is, but they don’t know it. Housman says something about this:

When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse hid I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.


Now times are altered: if I care
To bay a thing I can;
The pence are here and here’s the fair,
But where’s the lost young man?

The world is somewhat different. The lost young man was once looking at the fair. He couldn’t go in, and he liked it more for that; but now he is tired of the fair and tired of the baubles that once amused him and the riddles he once tried to guess, and he can’t understand that the young man still likes to go to the fair.

We hear a great deal said by the ignorant about the wickedness of the youth of today. Well, I don’t know: some of us were wicked when we were young. I don’t know what is the matter with the youth of today having their fling. I don’t know that they are any wickeder today. First, I don’t know what the word wicked moans. Oh, I do know what it means: It means unconventional conduct. But I don’t know whether unconventional conduct is wicked in the sense they mean it is wicked, or whether conventional conduct is good in the sense they mean it is good. Nobody else knows!

But I remember when I was a boy — it was a long time ago — I used to hear my mother complain. My mother would have been pretty nearly 125 years old if she had kept on living, but luckily for her she didn’t! I used to hear her complain of how much worse the girls were that she knew than the girls were when she was a girl. Of course, she didn’t furnish any bill of particulars; she didn’t specify, except not hanging up their clothes, and gadding, and things like that. But at any rate, they were worse. And my father used to tell about it, and I have an idea that Adam and Eve used to talk the same fool way.

The truth is, the world doesn’t change, or the generations of men or the human emotions. But the individual changes as he grows old. You hear about the Revolt of Youth. Some people are pleased at it and some displeased. Some see fine reasons for hope in what they call the youth movement. They can put it over on the old people, but not on the youth! There is a Revolt of Youth.

Well, youth has always been in revolt. The greatest trouble with youth is that it gets old. Age changes it. It doesn’t bring wisdom, though most old people think because they are old they have wisdom. But you can’t get wisdom by simply growing old. You can even forget it that way! Age means that the blood runs slow, that the emotions are not as strong, that you play safer, that you stay closer to the hearth. You don’t try to find new continents or even explore old ones. You don’t travel into unbeaten wilderness and lay out new roads. You stick to the old roads when you go out at all.

The world can’t go on with old people. It takes young ones that are daring, with courage and faith.

The difference between youth and old age is the same in every generation. The viewpoint is in growing old, that is all. But the old never seem wise enough to know it, and forever the old have been preaching to the young. Luckily, however, the young pay very little attention to it. They sometimes pretend to, but they never do pay much attention to it. Otherwise, life could not exist.

Both of these poets saw the futility of life: the little things of which it is made, scarcely worth the while. It is all right to talk about futility. We all know it, if we know much of anything. We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell. Let anybody study the ordinary, everyday details of life; see how closely he is bound and fettered; see how little it all amounts to.

There are a billion and a half people in the world, all of them trying to shout loud enough to be heard all at once, so as to attract the attention of the public, so they may be happy. A billion and a half of them, and if they all attracted attention none of them would have attention! Of course, attention is only valuable if the particular individual attracts it and nobody, else can get it. That is what makes presidents and kings — they get it and nobody else.

Then when you consider that it is all made up of little things, what is life all about, anyway? We do keep on living. It is easy enough to demonstrate to people who think that life is not worth while. We could do it easier if we could only settle what worth while means. But if we settle it and convince ourselves that it is not worth while, we still keep on living. life does not come from willing; rather it does not come from thought and reason. I don’t live because I think it is worth while; I live because I am a going concern, and every going concern tries to keep on going, I don’t care whether it is a tree, or a plant, or what we call a lower animal, or man, or the Socialist party. Anything that is going tries to go on by its own momentum, and it does just keep on going — it is what Schopenhauer called the ‘will to live.’ So we must assume that we will live anyhow as long as we can. When the machine runs down we don’t have to worry about it any longer.

Hotisman asked himself this question, and Omar asked himself this question. Life is of little value. What are we going to do while we live? In other words, what is the purpose, if we can use the word purpose in this way, which is an incorrect way? What purpose are we going to put into it? Why should we live; and if we must live, then what? Omar tells us what. He knew there was just one thing important; he knew what most thinkers know today. He put it differently — he and FitzGerald together. It is a balance between painful and pleasurable emotions. Every organized being looks for pleasurable emotions and tries to avoid painful ones. The seed planted in the ground seeks the light. The instinct of everything is to move away from pain and toward pleasure. Human beings are just like all the rest. The earth and all its manifestations are simply that. Omar figured it out, and after philosophizing and finding that he ever came out the same door where in he went, he said:

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

That is one way of forgetting life — one way of seeking pleasurable emotions: “I took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.” A way that has been fairly popular down through the ages! Even in spite of the worst that all the fanatics could possibly do, it has been a fairly universal remedy for the ills of man. It would be perfect If it were not for the day after!

He says in his wild exuberance:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-Garment of Repentance fling;
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter — and the Bird is on the Wing.

There isn’t much of it; but while it is fluttering, help it. It has but a little way to flutter, and it is on the wing!

To those who are not quite so strenuous, there is an appeal more to beauty, a somewhat more permanent although not much more, but a more beautiful conception of pleasure, which is all he could get:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise now!

Well, if you get the right jug and the right book and the rest of the paraphernalia, it isn’t so bad!

It is strange that two so different human beings have sought about the same thing. This physical emotional life that we hear so much about is the only life we know anything about. They sought their exaltation there, and Omar Khayyam pictured it very well. Housman again does as well. What does he say about the way to spend life and about life?

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.


Now, of my threescore, years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.


And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

What else is there? So while the light is still on and while I can still go, and when the cherry is in bloom — I will go to see the cherries hung with snow.

That is the whole philosophy of life for those who think; that is all there is to it, and it is what everybody is trying to do, without fully realizing it. Many are taking the Credit and letting the Cash go. Housman is right about that.

Since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

That is why I have so little patience with the old preaching to the young. If youth, with its quick-flowing blood, its strong imagination, its virile feeling; if youth, with its dreams and its hopes and ambitions, can go about the woodland to see the cherry hung with snow, why not? Who are the croakers, who have run their race and lived their time, who are they to keep back expression and hope and youth and joy from a world that is almost barren at the best?

It has been youth that has kept the world alive; it will be, because from the others emotion has fled; and with the fleeing of emotion, through the ossification of the brain, all there is left for them to do is to preach. I hope they have a good time doing that, and I am so glad the young pay no attention to it!

Of course, Housman and Omar and the rest of us are called pessimist’s. It is a horrible name. What is a pessimist, anyway? It is a man or a woman who looks at life as life is. If you could, you might take your choice, perhaps, as to being a pessimist or a pipe dreamer. But you can’t have it, because you look at the world according to the way you are made. Those are the two extremes. The pessimist takes life for what life is: not all sorrow, not all pain, not all beauty, not all good. Life is not black; life is not orange, red, or green, or all the colors of the rainbow. Life is no one shade or hue.

It is well enough to understand it. If pessimism could come as the result of thought, I would think a pessimist was a wise man. What is an optimist, anyway? He reminds “Me of a little boy running through the woods and looking up at the sky and not paying any attention to the brambles or thorns he is scrambling through. There is a stone in front of him and he trips over the stone. Browning said, “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” Others say, “God is love, love is God,” and so on. A man who thinks that is bound to be an optimist. He believes that things are good.

The pessimist doesn’t necessarily think that everything is bad, but he looks for the worst. He knows it will come sooner or later. When an optimist falls, he falls a long way; when a pessimist falls it is a very short fall. When an optimist is disappointed he is very, very sad, because he believed it was the best of all possible worlds, and God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world. When a pessimist is disappointed he is happy, for he wasn’t looking for anything.

This is the safest and by all odds it is the wisest outlook. Housman has put it in a little poem. It is about the last thing I shall give you. Housman is the only man I know of who has written a poem about pessimism. Nearly all the people who are talking about pessimism talk in prose; it is very prosy. Poems are generally written about optimism:

I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

Those are the sort of poems. Of course there have been poems written about pessimism. Poetry is really, to my way of thinking, good only if it is beauty and if it is music.

I don’t mean tonight to discuss the question of free verse and poetry, or the comparative merits of the two styles, or of prose, but I do think that poetry is an exaltation and that you can’t hold it for long. Poetry ought to have beauty and it ought to have music. It should have both. You can be the poet of sadness; sadness lends itself to poetry as much as gladness, although few poets know how to use it. Listen to this from Housman:

With rue my heart is laden;
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.


By brooks too broad for leading
The lightfoot boys are laid,
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where raises fade.

That is sad, isn’t it? But it is beautiful.

I remember once, years and years ago, reading Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African farm, in which she describes the simple Boers of South Africa, with their sorrows and their pleasures. She used this expression: which it took me some time to understand, in describing pain and pleasure: “There is a depth of emotion so broad and deep that pain and pleasure are the same.” They are the same, and I think they find their meeting in beauty. The beauty, even if it is painful, is still beauty. You find the meeting of pain and pleasure, and you can hardly distinguish between the two emotions.

Housman knew it; he knew how to do it. Here is his idea of the young lad who dies: not passes on — passes off. He dies:

Now hollow fires burn out to black
And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.


Oh never fear man, nought’s to dread,
Look not left or right:
In all the endless road you tread
There’s nothing but the night.

Does it bring you painful or pleasurable emotions? It is beautiful; it is profound; it is deep. To me the painful and pleasurable are blended in the beauty, and I think the two may be one.

Housman, as I have said, is the only one I know who wrote a poem of pessimism; and this, like all of his, is very short, and I will read it. Somebody else may have written one; but Housman carries the philosophy of pessimism into poetry, perhaps the philosophy that I have given you. This poem is supposed to be introduced by somebody who complains of Housman’s dark, almost tragical verses. For in every line that he ever wrote there is no let down. He is like Hardy; he never hauled down the flag. Life to him was what he saw; what the world saw meant nothing. This was the view in all of Housman’s work. In all of his work there is not one false note; and when I say a false note I mean one that is not in tune with the rest. This is his idea of pessimism in poetry:

“Terence this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.


We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.”


Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.


Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near.
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet.
And nothing now, remained to do
But begin the game anew.


Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than Ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure.
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
‘Tis true the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul” is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

“Luck’s a chance but trouble’s sure.” The moral of it is to “train for ill and not for good.”

If I had my choice, I would not like to be an optimist, even assuming that people did not know that I was an idiot. I wouldn’t want to be an optimist because when I fell I would fall such a terribly long way. The wise man trains for ill and not for good. He is sure he will need that training, and the other will take care of itself as it comes along.

Of course, life is not all pleasant: it is filled with tragedy. Housman has told us of it, and Omar Khayyam tells us of it. No man and no woman can live and forget death. However much they try. it is there, and it probably should be faced like anything else. Measured time is very short. Life, amongst other things, is full of futility.

Omar Khayyam understood, and Housman understood. There are other poets that have felt the same way. Omar Khayyam looked on the shortness of life and understood it. He pictured himself as here for a brief moment. He loved his friends; he loved companionship; he loved wine. I don’t know how much of it he drank. He talked about it a lot. It might have symbolized more than it really meant to him. It has been a solace, all down through the ages. Not only that, but it has been the symbol of other things that mean as much — the wine of life, the joy of living.

     

1961 Inaugural Address (by John F. Kennedy)

President John F. Kennedy – recorded 20 January 1961 in Washington, DC – courtesy of CSPAN


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLmiOEk59n8

I Have a Dream (by Martin Luther King, Jr.)

I Have a Dream
by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Washington, DC
28 August 1963

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by a sign stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

                Free at last! Free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

The Transcendentalist (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson



THE TRANSCENDENTALIST
 A Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842

 
       The first thing we have to say respecting what are called “new
views” here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are
not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these
new times.  The light is always identical in its composition, but it
falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first
revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in
theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it
classifies.  What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is
Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842.  As thinkers, mankind have
ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first
class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first
class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second
class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses
give us representations of things, but what are the things
themselves, they cannot tell.  The materialist insists on facts, on
history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man;
the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on
miracle, on individual culture.  These two modes of thinking are both
natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in
higher nature.  He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the
impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty,
and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that
things are as his senses represent them.  But I, he says, affirm
facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the
same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to
doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native
superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by
which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a
retirement from the senses to discern.  Every materialist will be an
idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

        The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits.  He
does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see
that alone.  He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair,
and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the
reverse side of the tapestry, as the _other end_, each being a sequel
or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him.  This
manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an
independent and anomalous position without there, into the
consciousness.  Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most
logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, “Though we
should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss,
we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we
perceive.” What more could an idealist say?

        The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at
fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that
his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but
knows where he stands, and what he does.  Yet how easy it is to show
him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and
that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions,
to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his
sense.  The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on
blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house
or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the
angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and
solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off
to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and
goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of
thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, — a bit of
bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on
the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness.  And this wild balloon,
in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole
state and faculty.  One thing, at least, he says is certain, and does
not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication
table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if
I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow; — but for
these thoughts, I know not whence they are.  They change and pass
away.  But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will
continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his
figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on
just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of
stone.

        In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure
from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that.
The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons
the world an appearance.  The materialist respects sensible masses,
Society, Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment,
every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or
amount of objects, every social action.  The idealist has another
measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the _rank_ which things
themselves take in his consciousness; not at all, the size or
appearance.  Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other
natures are better or worse reflectors.  Nature, literature, history,
are only subjective phenomena.  Although in his action overpowered by
the laws of action, and so, warmly cooperating with men, even
preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or
after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into
representatives of truths.  He does not respect labor, or the
products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold
symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of
being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates
the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts, for
themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if
his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene.  His
thought, — that is the Universe.  His experience inclines him to
behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing
perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself,
centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all
things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that
aforesaid Unknown Centre of him.

        From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this
beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics.
It is simpler to be self-dependent.  The height, the deity of man is,
to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force.  Society is
good when it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to
solitude.  Everything real is self-existent.  Everything divine
shares the self-existence of Deity.  All that you call the world is
the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of
the powers of thought
, of those that are dependent and of those that
are independent of your will.  Do not cumber yourself with fruitless
pains to mend and remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and
all things will go well.  You think me the child of my circumstances:
I make my circumstance.  Let any thought or motive of mine be
different from that they are, the difference will transform my
condition and economy.  I — this thought which is called I, — is
the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.  The mould
is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould.  You call
it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me.  Am I in
harmony with myself? my position will seem to you just and
commanding.  Am I vicious and insane? my fortunes will seem to you
obscure and descending.  As I am, so shall I associate, and, so shall
I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.  Jesus acted so,
because he thought so.  I do not wish to overlook or to gainsay any
reality; I say, I make my circumstance: but if you ask me, Whence am
I?  I feel like other men my relation to that Fact which cannot be
spoken, or defined, nor even thought, but which exists, and will
exist.

        The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual
doctrine.  He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the
human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in
inspiration, and in ecstasy.  He wishes that the spiritual principle
should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible
applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal.  Thus,
the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and
never, who said it?  And so he resists all attempts to palm other
rules and measures on the spirit than its own.

        In action, he easily incurs the charge of antinomianism by his
avowal that he, who has the Lawgiver, may with safety not only
neglect, but even contravene every written commandment.  In the play
of Othello, the expiring Desdemona absolves her husband of the
murder, to her attendant Emilia.  Afterwards, when Emilia charges him
with the crime, Othello exclaims,

        “You heard her say herself it was not I.”

        Emilia replies,

        “The more angel she, and thou the blacker devil.”

        Of this fine incident, Jacobi, the Transcendental moralist,
makes use, with other parallel instances, in his reply to Fichte.
Jacobi, refusing all measure of right and wrong except the
determinations of the private spirit, remarks that there is no crime
but has sometimes been a virtue.  “I,” he says, “am that atheist,
that godless person who, in opposition to an imaginary doctrine of
calculation, would lie as the dying Desdemona lied; would lie and
deceive, as Pylades when he personated Orestes; would assassinate
like Timoleon; would perjure myself like Epaminondas, and John de
Witt; I would resolve on suicide like Cato; I would commit sacrilege
with David; yea, and pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath, for no other
reason than that I was fainting for lack of food.  For, I have
assurance in myself, that, in pardoning these faults according to the
letter, man exerts the sovereign right which the majesty of his being
confers on him; he sets the seal of his divine nature to the grace he
accords.”

        In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human
thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any
presentiment; any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it
as most in nature.  The oriental mind has always tended to this
largeness.  Buddhism is an expression of it.  The Buddhist who thanks
no man, who says, “do not flatter your benefactors,” but who, in his
conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its
reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has
done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

        You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a
Transcendental _party_; that there is no pure Transcendentalist; that
we know of none but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that
all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in
doctrine, have stopped short of their goal.  We have had many
harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history
has afforded no example.  I mean, we have yet no man who has leaned
entirely on his character, and eaten angels’ food; who, trusting to
his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for
universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed,
sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his
own hands.  Only in the instinct of the lower animals, we find the
suggestion of the methods of it, and something higher than our
understanding.  The squirrel hoards nuts, and the bee gathers honey,
without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without
selfishness or disgrace.

        Shall we say, then, that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or
excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his
integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the
satisfaction of his wish.  Nature is transcendental, exists
primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought
for the morrow.  Man owns the dignity of the life which throbs around
him in chemistry, and tree, and animal, and in the involuntary
functions of his own body; yet he is balked when he tries to fling
himself into this enchanted circle, where all is done without
degradation.  Yet genius and virtue predict in man the same absence
of private ends, and of condescension to circumstances, united with
every trait and talent of beauty and power.

        This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic
philosophers; falling on despotic times, made patriot Catos and
Brutuses; falling on superstitious times, made prophets and apostles;
on popish times, made protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of
Faith against the preachers of Works; on prelatical times, made
Puritans and Quakers; and falling on Unitarian and commercial times,
makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which we know.

        It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of
the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of
that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the
skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing
in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the
senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or
imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which
experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind
itself; and he denominated them _Transcendental_ forms.  The
extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have
given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that
extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is
popularly called at the present day _Transcendental_.

        Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist,
yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at
least in our creed, all authority o
ver our experience, has deeply
colored the conversation and poetry of the present day; and the
history of genius and of religion in these times, though impure, and
as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual, will be the history
of this tendency.

        It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest
observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw
themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and
the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical
way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify
their separation.  They hold themselves aloof: they feel the
disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and
they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the
degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can
propose to them.  They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat
worthy to do!  What they do, is done only because they are
overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides; and they
consent to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream
the writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or
empires seems drudgery.

        Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and
these must.  The question, which a wise man and a student of modern
history will ask, is, what that kind is?  And truly, as in
ecclesiastical history we take so much pains to know what the
Gnostics, what the Essenes, what the Manichees, and what the
Reformers believed, it would not misbecome us to inquire nearer home,
what these companions and contemporaries of ours think and do, at
least so far as these thoughts and actions appear to be not
accidental and personal, but common to many, and the inevitable
flower of the Tree of Time.  Our American literature and spiritual
history are, we confess, in the optative mood; but whoso knows these
seething brains, these admirable radicals, these unsocial
worshippers, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away, will
believe that this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its mark.

        They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation
is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they
incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in
the country rather than in the town, and to find their tasks and
amusements in solitude.  Society, to be sure, does not like this very
well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he
declareth all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil,
nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.  Meantime, this retirement
does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but
if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this
part is chosen both from temperament and from principle; with some
unwillingness, too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for
these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial, —
they are not stockish or brute, — but joyous; susceptible,
affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be
loved.  Like the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times
a day, “But are you sure you love me?” Nay, if they tell you their
whole thought, they will own that love seems to them the last and
highest gift of nature; that there are persons whom in their hearts
they daily thank for existing, — persons whose faces are perhaps
unknown to them, but whose fame and spirit have penetrated their
solitude, — and for whose sake they wish to exist.  To behold the
beauty of another character, which inspires a new interest in our
own; to behold the beauty lodged in a human being, with such vivacity
of apprehension, that I am instantly forced home to inquire if I am
not deformity itself: to behold in another the expression of a love
so high that it assures itself, — assures itself also to me against
every possible casualty except my unworthiness; — these are degrees
on the scale of human happiness, to which they have ascended; and it
is a fidelity to this sentiment which has made common association
distasteful to them.  They wish a just and even fellowship, or none.
They cannot gossip with you, and they do not wish, as they are
sincere and religious, to gratify any mere curiosity which you may
entertain.  Like fairies, they do not wish to be spoken of.  Love me,
they say, but do not ask who is my cousin and my uncle.  If you do
not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and
behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset.  If you
cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say.  I will not
molest myself for you.  I do not wish to be profaned.

        And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not this love,
would prevail in their circumstances, because of the extravagant
demand they make on human nature.  That, indeed, constitutes a new
feature in their portrait, that they are the most exacting and
extortionate critics.  Their quarrel with every man they meet, is not
with his kind, but with his degree.  There is not enough of him, —
that is the only fault.  They prolong their privilege of childhood in
this wise, of doing nothing, — but making immense demands on all the
gladiators in the lists of action and fame.  They make us feel the
strange disappointment which overcasts every human youth.  So many
promising youths, and never a finished man!  The profound nature will
have a savage rudeness; the delicate one will be shallow, or the
victim of sensibility; the richly accomplished will have some capital
absurdity; and so every piece has a crack.  ‘T is strange, but this
masterpiece is a result of such an extreme delicacy, that the most
unobserved flaw in the boy will neutralize the most aspiring genius,
and spoil the work.  Talk with a seaman of the hazards to life in his
profession, and he will ask you, “Where are the old sailors? do you
not see that all are young men?” And we, on this sea of human
thought, in like manner inquire, Where are the old idealists? where
are they who represented to the last generation that extravagant
hope, which a few happy aspirants suggest to ours?  In looking at the
class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the matronage of the
land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, one asks, Where
are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible and heavenly
world, to these?  Are they dead, — taken in early ripeness to the
gods, — as ancient wisdom foretold their fate?  Or did the high idea
die out of them, and leave their unperfumed body as its tomb and
tablet, announcing to all that the celestial inhabitant, who once
gave them beauty, had departed?  Will it be better with the new
generation?  We easily predict a fair future to each new candidate
who enters the lists, but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low
aims and ill example do what we can to defeat this hope.  Then these
youths bring us a rough but effectual aid.  By their unconcealed
dissatisfaction, they expose our poverty, and the insignificance of
man to man.  A man is a poor limitary benefactor.  He ought to be a
shower of benefits — a great influence, which should never let his
brother go, but should refresh old merits continually with new ones;
so that, though absent, he should never be out of my mind, his name
never far from my lips; but if the earth should open at my side, or
my last hour were come, his name should be the prayer I should utter
to the Universe.  But in ou
r experience, man is cheap, and friendship
wants its deep sense.  We affect to dwell with our friends in their
absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they
let us go.  These exacting children advertise us of our wants.  There
is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this
one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely
exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist
in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible
friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and
what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
service to the race of man.

        With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it
cannot be wondered at, that they are repelled by vulgarity and
frivolity in people.  They say to themselves, It is better to be
alone than in bad company.  And it is really a wish to be met, — the
wish to find society for their hope and religion, — which prompts
them to shun what is called society.  They feel that they are never
so fit for friendship, as when they have quitted mankind, and taken
themselves to friend.  A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the
hills or the woods, which they can people with the fair and worthy
creation of the fancy, can give them often forms so vivid, that these
for the time shall seem real, and society the illusion.

        But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw
them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they
are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they
bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not
willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious
rites, in the enterprises of education, of missions foreign or
domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance
society.  They do not even like to vote.  The philanthropists inquire
whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear
that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for
then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity.  What
right, cries the good world, has the man of genius to retreat from
work, and indulge himself?  The popular literary creed seems to be,
`I am a sublime genius; I ought not therefore to labor.’ But genius
is the power to labor better and more availably.  Deserve thy genius:
exalt it.  The good, the illuminated, sit apart from the rest,
censuring their dulness and vices, as if they thought that, by
sitting very grand in their chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and
congressmen would see the error of their ways, and flock to them.
But the good and wise must learn to act, and carry salvation to the
combatants and demagogues in the dusty arena below.

        On the part of these children, it is replied, that life and
their faculty seem to them gifts too rich to be squandered on such
trifles as you propose to them.  What you call your fundamental
institutions, your great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses,
and, when nearly seen, paltry matters.  Each `Cause,’ as it is
called, — say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism,
— becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have
been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into
portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to
suit purchasers.  You make very free use of these words `great’ and
`holy,’ but few things appear to them such.  Few persons have any
magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and the philanthropies
and charities have a certain air of quackery.  As to the general
course of living, and the daily employments of men, they cannot see
much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious circle;
and, as no great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing noble
in the arts by which they are maintained.  Nay, they have made the
experiment, and found that, from the liberal professions to the
coarsest manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the
college to the conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning call,
there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates
a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without
an aim.

        Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not
wish to perform it.  I do not wish to do one thing but once.  I do
not love routine.  Once possessed of the principle, it is equally
easy to make four or forty thousand applications of it.  A great man
will be content to have indicated in any the slightest manner his
perception of the reigning Idea of his time, and will leave to those
who like it the multiplication of examples.  When he has hit the
white, the rest may shatter the target.  Every thing admonishes us
how needlessly long life is.  Every moment of a hero so raises and
cheers us, that a twelve-month is an age.  All that the brave Xanthus
brings home from his wars, is the recollection that, at the storming
of Samos, “in the heat of the battle, Pericles smiled on me, and
passed on to another detachment.” It is the quality of the moment,
not the number of days, of events, or of actors, that imports.

        New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if
you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of
the labor.  We are miserable with inaction.  We perish of rest and
rust: but we do not like your work.

        `Then,’ says the world, `show me your own.’

        `We have none.’

        `What will you do, then?’ cries the world.

        `We will wait.’

        `How long?’

        `Until the Universe rises up and calls us to work.’

        `But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.’

        `Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_, (as you call
it,) but I will not move until I have the highest command.  If no
call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want
of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence.  Your
virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me.  I know that which
shall come will cheer me.  If I cannot work, at least I need not lie.
All that is clearly due to-day is not to lie.  In other places, other
men have encountered sharp trials, and have behaved themselves well.
The martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung alive on meat-hooks.  Cannot
we screw our courage to patience and truth, and without complaint, or
even with good-humor, await our turn of action in the Infinite
Counsels?’

        But, to come a little closer to the secret of these persons, we
must say, that to them it seems a very easy matter to answer the
objections of the man of the world, but not so easy to dispose of the
doubts and objections that occur to themselves.  They are exercised
in their own spirit with queries, which acquaint them with all
adversity, and with the trials of the bravest heroes.  When I asked
them concerning their private experience, they answered somewhat in
this wise: It is not to be denied that there must be some wide
difference between my faith and other faith; and mine is a certain

brief experience, which surprised me in the highway or in the market,
in some place, at some time, — whether in the body or out of the
body, God knoweth, — and made me aware that I had played the fool
with fools all this time, but that law existed for me and for all;
that to me belonged trust, a child’s trust and obedience, and the
worship of ideas, and I should never be fool more.  Well, in the
space of an hour, probably, I was let down from this height; I was at
my old tricks, the selfish member of a selfish society.  My life is
superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I
die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing an Universe
which I do not use?  I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith
for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

        These two states of thought diverge every moment, and stand in
wild contrast.  To him who looks at his life from these moments of
illumination, it will seem that he skulks and plays a mean,
shiftless, and subaltern part in the world.  That is to be done which
he has not skill to do, or to be said which others can say better,
and he lies by, or occupies his hands with some plaything, until his
hour comes again.  Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere
waiting: it was not that we were born for.  Any other could do it as
well, or better.  So little skill enters into these works, so little
do they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies little
what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make
fortunes, or govern the state.  The worst feature of this double
consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the
soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other,
never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and
din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and,
with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to
reconcile themselves.  Yet, what is my faith?  What am I?  What but a
thought of serenity and independence, an abode in the deep blue sky?
Presently the clouds shut down again; yet we retain the belief that
this petty web we weave will at last be overshot and reticulated with
veins of the blue, and that the moments will characterize the days.
Patience, then, is for us, is it not?  Patience, and still patience.
When we pass, as presently we shall, into some new infinitude, out of
this Iceland of negations, it will please us to reflect that, though
we had few virtues or consolations, we bore with our indigence, nor
once strove to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat of any kind.

        But this class are not sufficiently characterized, if we omit
to add that they are lovers and worshippers of Beauty.  In the
eternal trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, each in its
perfection including the three, they prefer to make Beauty the sign
and head.  Something of the same taste is observable in all the moral
movements of the time, in the religious and benevolent enterprises.
They have a liberal, even an aesthetic spirit.  A reference to Beauty
in action sounds, to be sure, a little hollow and ridiculous in the
ears of the old church.  In politics, it has often sufficed, when
they treated of justice, if they kept the bounds of selfish
calculation.  If they granted restitution, it was prudence which
granted it.  But the justice which is now claimed for the black, and
the pauper, and the drunkard is for Beauty, — is for a necessity to
the soul of the agent, not of the beneficiary.  I say, this is the
tendency, not yet the realization.  Our virtue totters and trips,
does not yet walk firmly.  Its representatives are austere; they
preach and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace.  They are
still liable to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange
world, attaches to the zealot.  A saint should be as dear as the
apple of the eye.  Yet we are tempted to smile, and we flee from the
working to the speculative reformer, to escape that same slight
ridicule.  Alas for these days of derision and criticism!  We call
the Beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean,
escaping the dowdiness of the good, and the heartlessness of the
true.  — They are lovers of nature also, and find an indemnity in
the inviolable order of the world for the violated order and grace of
man.

        There is, no doubt, a great deal of well-founded objection to
be spoken or felt against the sayings and doings of this class, some
of whose traits we have selected; no doubt, they will lay themselves
open to criticism and to lampoons, and as ridiculous stories will be
to be told of them as of any.  There will be cant and pretension;
there will be subtilty and moonshine.  These persons are of unequal
strength, and do not all prosper.  They complain that everything
around them must be denied; and if feeble, it takes all their
strength to deny, before they can begin to lead their own life.
Grave seniors insist on their respect to this institution, and that
usage; to an obsolete history; to some vocation, or college, or
etiquette, or beneficiary, or charity, or morning or evening call,
which they resist, as what does not concern them.  But it costs such
sleepless nights, alienations and misgivings, — they have so many
moods about it; — these old guardians never change _their_ minds;
they have but one mood on the subject, namely, that Antony is very
perverse, — that it is quite as much as Antony can do, to assert his
rights, abstain from what he thinks foolish, and keep his temper.  He
cannot help the reaction of this injustice in his own mind.  He is
braced-up and stilted; all freedom and flowing genius, all sallies of
wit and frolic nature are quite out of the question; it is well if he
can keep from lying, injustice, and suicide.  This is no time for
gaiety and grace.  His strength and spirits are wasted in rejection.
But the strong spirits overpower those around them without effort.
Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, quite withdraws them
from all notice of these carping critics; they surrender themselves
with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and only by implication reject
the clamorous nonsense of the hour.  Grave seniors talk to the deaf,
— church and old book mumble and ritualize to an unheeding,
preoccupied and advancing mind, and thus they by happiness of greater
momentum lose no time, but take the right road at first.

        But all these of whom I speak are not proficients; they are
novices; they only show the road in which man should travel, when the
soul has greater health and prowess.  Yet let them feel the dignity
of their charge, and deserve a larger power.  Their heart is the ark
in which the fire is concealed, which shall burn in a broader and
universal flame.  Let them obey the Genius then most when his impulse
is wildest; then most when he seems to lead to uninhabitable desarts
of thought and life; for the path which the hero travels alone is the
highway of health and benefit to mankind.  What is the privilege and
nobility of our nature, but its persistency, through its power to
attach itself to what is permanent?

        Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and
must behold them with what charity it can.  Possibly some benefit may
yet accrue from them to the state.  In our Mechanics’ Fair, there
must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenters’ planes
, and baking
troughs, but also some few finer instruments, — raingauges,
thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers,
sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept
specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine,
detecting instinct, who betray the smallest accumulations of wit and
feeling in the bystander.  Perhaps too there might be room for the
exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark with power to
convey the electricity to others.  Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at
sea speaks the frigate or `line packet’ to learn its longitude, so it
may not be without its advantage that we should now and then
encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual
compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers.

        Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when
every voice is raised for a new road or another statute, or a
subscription of stock, for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry,
for a new house or a larger business, for a political party, or the
division of an estate, — will you not tolerate one or two solitary
voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not
marketable or perishable?  Soon these improvements and mechanical
inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of
memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new
seats of trade, or the geologic changes: — all gone, like the shells
which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony to-day, forever
renewed to be forever destroyed.  But the thoughts which these few
hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only
by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in
beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest
themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed
clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.

Gettysburg Address and Emancipation Proclamation (by Abraham Lincoln)

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
[Given November 19, 1863, on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA]

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war … testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated … can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate … we cannot consecrate … we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us … that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion … that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom … and that government of the people … by the people … for the people … shall not perish from this earth.

* * *

The Emancipation Proclamation:

By the President of the United States of America:

A PROCLAMATION

  Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation
was issued by the President of the United States, containing,
among other things, the following, to wit:

  “That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as
slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people
whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall
be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive
government of the United States, including the military and naval
authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such
persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any
of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

  “That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid,
by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any,
in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in
rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State
or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith
represented in the Congress of the United States by members
chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified
voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the
absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive
evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then
in rebellion against the United States.”

  Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United
States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief
of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed
rebellion against the authority and government of the United States,
and as a fit and necessary war measure for supressing said
rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in
accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the
full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned,
order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the
people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against
the United States the following, to wit:

  Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard,
Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension,
Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans,
including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida,
Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the
forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the
counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton, Elizabeth City, York,
Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and
Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left
precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

  And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do
order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said
designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall
be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States,
including the military and naval authorities thereof, will
recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

  And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to
abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and
I recommend to them that, in all case when allowed, they labor
faithfully for reasonable wages.

  And I further declare and make known that such persons of
suitable condition will be received into the armed service of
the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and
other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

  And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice,
warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke
the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor
of Almighty God.

window.google_render_ad();
window.google_render_ad();

window.google_render_ad();
window.google_render_ad();
window.google_render_ad();
window.google_render_ad();
window.google_render_ad();
window.google_render_ad();