Version 7.01 | |||||||||||
Following are some passages from various authors whom I have read (or reread) recently. These are passages which have significant meaning for me and which I have on occasion cited in my correspondence with my friends. To select a quotation, click on the author's name.
An Electronic Educational Publication -- Material Included Herein Is For Educational Use Only -- No Reprint Permission Granted Or Available Blaise Pascal from the Pensées Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge, only to find that they know nothing and come back to the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance which knows itself. [V.83] There is no certainty, apart from faith, as to whether man was created by a good God, an evil demon, or just by chance, and so it is a matter of doubt, depending on our origin, whether these principles are true, false or uncertain. Moreover, no one can be sure, apart from faith, whether he is sleeping or waking, because when we are asleep we are just as firmly convinced that we are awake as we are now. As we often dream we are are dreaming, piling up one dream on another, is it not possible that this half of our life is itself just a dream, on to which others are grafted and from which we shall awake when we die? . . . Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and sceptism, beyond all human philosophy. Man transcends man. Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed, that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it. Let us learn our true nature from the uncreated and incarnate truth. If we seek truth through reason we cannot avoid one of these three sects. You cannot be a sceptic or a Platonist without stifling nature, you cannot be a domgatist without turning your back on reason. Nature confounds the sceptics and Platonists, and reason confounds the dogmatists. What then will become of you, man, seeking to discover your true condition through natural reason? You cannot avoid one of these three sects nor survive in any of them. Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason. Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God. Is it not as clear as day that man's condition is dual? The point is that if man had never been corrupted, he would, in his innocence, confidently enjoy both truth and felicity, and, if man had never been anything but corrupt, he would have no idea either of truth or bliss. But unhappy as we are (and we should be less so if there were no element of greatness in our condition) we have an idea of happiness but we cannot attain it. We perceive an image of truth and possess nothing but falsehood, being equally incapable of absolute ignorance and certain knowledge; so obvious is it that we once enjoyed a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen. Let us then conceive that man's condition is dual. Let us conceive that man infinitely transcends man, and that without the aid of faith he would remain inconceivable to himself, for who cannot see that unless we realize the duality of human nature we remain invincibly ignorant of the truth about ourselves? [VII.131] What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture. [VIII.136] It is absurd of us to rely on the company of our fellows, as wretched and helpless as we are; they will not help us; we shall die alone. We must act then as if we were alone. If that were so, would we build superb houses, etc.? We should unhesitatingly look for the truth. And, if we refuse, it shows we have a higher regard for men's esteem than for pursuing the truth. [XII.151] There are only three sorts of people: those who have found God and serve him; those who are busy seeking him and have not found him; those who live without either seeking or finding him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy, those in the middle are unhappy and reasonable. [XII.160] There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason. [XIII.182] Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them. [XIII.185] Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness. [XIV.192] The whole visible world is only an imperceptible dot in nature's ample bosom. No idea comes near it; it is no good inflating our conceptions beyond imaginable space, we only bring forth atoms compared to the reality of things. Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest perceptible mark of God's omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that thought. [XV.199] The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd. [XXIII.298] The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways. [423] Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness. [412] Return to top of page Rabindranath Tagore from Sadhana, The Realisation of Life But can it then be said that there is no difference between Brahma and our individual soul? Of course the difference is obvious. Call it illusion or ignorance, or whatever name you may give it, it is there. You can offer explanations but you cannot explain it away. Even illusion is true as illusion. Brahma is Brahma, he is the infinite ideal of perfection. But we are not what we truly are; we are ever to become true, ever to become Brahma. There is the eternal play of love in the relation between this being and the becoming; and in the depth of this mystery is the source of all truth and beauty that sustains the endless march of creation. In the music of the rushing stream sounds the the joyful assurance, 'I shall become the sea.' It is not a vain assumption; it is true humility, for it is the truth. The river has no other alternative. On both sides of its banks it has numerous fields and forests, villages and towns; it can serve them in various ways, cleanse them and feed them, carry their produce from place to place. But it can have only partial relations with these, and however long it may linger among them it remains separate; it never can become a town or a forest. But it can and does become the sea. The lesser moving water has its affinity with the great motionless water of the ocean. It moves through the thousands of objects on its onward course, and its motion finds its finality when it reaches the sea. The river can become the sea, but she can never make the sea part and parcel of herself. If, by some chance, she has encircled some broad sheet of water and pretends that she has made the sea a part of herself, we at once know that it is not so, that her current is still seeking rest in the great ocean to which it can never set boundaries. In the same manner, our soul can only become Brahma as the river becomes the sea. Everything else she touches at one of her points, then leaves and moves on, but she never can leave Brahman and move beyond him. Once our soul realises her ultimate object of repose in Brahma, all her movements acquire a purpose. It is this ocean of infinite rest which gives significance to endless activities. Is is this perfectness of being that lends to the imperfection of becoming that quality of beauty which finds its expression in all poetry, drama, and art. There must be a complete idea that animates a poem. Every sentence of the poem touches that idea. When the reader realises that pervading idea, as he reads on, then the reading of the poem is full of joy to him. Then every part of the poem becomes radiantly significant by the light of the whole. But if the poem goes on interminably, never expressing the idea of the whole, only throwing off disconnected images, however beautiful, it becomes wearisome and unprofitable in the extreme. The progress of our soul is like a perfect poem. It has an infinite idea which once realised makes all movements full of meaning and joy. But if we detach its movements from that ultimate idea, if we do not see the infinite rest and only see the infinite motion, then existence appears to us a monstrous evil, impetuously rushing towards an unending aimlessness. . . Knowledge is partial , because our intellect is an instrument, it is only a part of us, it can give us information about things which can be divided up and analysed, and whose properties can be classified, part by part. But Brahma is perfect, and knowledge which is partial can never be a knowledge of him. But he can be known by joy, by love. For joy is knowledge in its completeness, it is knowing by our whole being. Intellect sets us apart from the things to be known, but love knows its object by fusion. Such knowledge is immediate and knows no doubt. It is the same as knowing our own selves, only more so. Therefore, as the Upanishads say, mind can never know Brahma, words can never describe him; he can only be known by our soul, by her joy in him, by her love. Or, in other words, we can only come into relation with him by union-- union of our whole being. We must be one with our Father, we must be perfect as he is. . . Return to top of page Henri Bergson from Creative Evolution It is the essence of reasoning to shut us up in the circle of the given. But action breaks the circle. If we had never seen a man swim, we might say that swimming is an impossible thing, inasmuch as, to learn to swim, we must begin by holding ourselves up in the water and, consequently, already know how to swim.. Reasoning, in fact, always nails us down to solid ground. But if, quite simply, I throw myself into the water without fear, I may keep myself up well enough at first by merely struggling, and gradually adapt myself to the new environment: I shall thus have learnt to swim. So, in theory, there is a kind of absurdity in trying to know otherwise than by intelligence; but if the risks be frankly accepted, action will perhaps cut the knot that reasoning has tied and will not unloose. Return to top of page Ernest Becker from Denial of Death We always knew that there was something peculiar about man, something deep down that characterized him and set him apart from the other animals. It was something that had to go right to his core, something that made him suffer his peculiar fate, that made it impossible to escape. For ages, when philosophers talked about the core of man they referred to it as his 'essence,' something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found; man's peculiarity remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic... We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life, a history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet.This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew. Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-grasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways-- the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with... It is only if you let the full weight of this paradox sink down on your mind and feelings that you can realize what an impossible situation it is for an animal to be in. I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man's condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right. Babies are occasionally born with gills and tails, but this is not publicized-- instead it is hushed up. Who wants to face up fully to the creatures we are, clawing and grasping for breath in a universe beyond our ken? I think such events illustrate the meaning of Pascal's chilling reflection: 'Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.' ... Return to top of page Thomas Wolfe from Look Homeward Angel And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round skull, imprisoned in that beating and most sacred heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never. from a letter to Maxwell Perkins written shortly before Wolfe's death Dear Max: I'm sneaking this against orders-- but "I've got a hunch"-- and I wanted to write these words to you. I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close; and I don't think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me-- I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all 1000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do-- and I know now I am just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before-- and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can't explain I know I am a deeper and wiser one-- If I get on my feet and out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I'll come back. -- Whatever happens-- I had this "hunch" and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and glory and the power of life and of the city was below-- Yours always, Tom Return to top of page John Steinbeck from East of Eden Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight in the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world grows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the grey, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-- the glory-- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is a great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces mashaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost. Return to top of page Iris Murdoch from Message to the Planet "I have listened to you carefully," said Most, "but I have not changed my mind. I think I did communicate with him, as I hoped and expected to do. You sneered just now about the conscience of mankind. Now when wickedness is so educated and so well armed, it may be the task of innumerable people and peoples to be that conscience, and to preserve the memory of what evil is and what good is. Do not forget the things which thine eyes have seen, tell them to thy sons and to thy sons' sons." "For the Lord thy God is a jealous God, who destroys his enemies, which here below means do not forgive but requite evil with evil as soon as you have the power! All right, I'm sorry, I am simply trying to offend you, I hope I have not succeeded." "No," said Most gravely, "you have not. Listen. You think I am an ignorant blundering intruder. I must risk seeming or even being that. I believe that your friend is trying to remember things which I can help him to find." "Old Jewish things." "Old human things. He confronts a darkness, perhaps a crucial darkness, upon the long path you spoke of, he confronts an abyss which he has always known of and perhaps can now name." "Don't tell me!" "He said that he had always felt that he was engaged in a dialogue--" "Please not that sickening banality." "Why are you so afraid of the name of God? Is not that something that human beings should remember and are in danger of forgetting? He has the concept, and so have you." "The concept is empty." "If it is empty it is there. Nothing could be more important to this planet than preserving the name of God, we must not abandon it, it is entrusted to us in this age, to carry it onward through the darkness--" Return to top of page Langston Hughes a poem Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken wingéd bird That cannot fly. Return to top of page Kenneth Grahame from The Wind in the Willows We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal's inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word `smell,' for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning? inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood. Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morning he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day's work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him. The call was clear, the summons was plain. He must obey it instantly, and go. `Ratty!' he called, full of joyful excitement, `hold on! Come back! I want you, quick!' `Oh, come along, Mole, do!' replied the Rat cheerfully, still plodding along. `Please stop, Ratty!' pleaded the poor Mole, in anguish of heart. `You don't understand! It's my home, my old home! I've just come across the smell of it, and it's close by here, really quite close. And I must go to it, I must, I must! Oh, come back, Ratty! Please, please come back!' The Rat was by this time very far ahead, too far to hear clearly what the Mole was calling, too far to catch the sharp note of painful appeal in his voice. And he was much taken up with the weather, for he too could smell something -- something suspiciously like approaching snow. `Mole, we mustn't stop now, really!' he called back. `We'll come for it to-morrow, whatever it is you've found. But I daren't stop now -- it's late, and the snow's coming on again, and I'm not sure of the way! And I want your nose, Mole, so come on quick, there's a good fellow!' And the Rat pressed forward on his way without waiting for an answer. Poor Mole stood alone in the road, his heart torn asunder, and a big sob gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him, to leap up to the surface presently, he knew, in passionate escape. But even under such a test as this his loyalty to his friend stood firm. Never for a moment did he dream of abandoning him. Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured, and finally claimed him imperiously. He dared not tarry longer within their magic circle. With a wrench that tore his very heartstrings he set his face down the road and followed submissively in the track of the Rat, while faint, thin little smells, still dogging his retreating nose, reproached him for his new friendship and his callous forgetfulness. With an effort he caught up to the unsuspecting Rat, who began chattering cheerfully about what they would do when they got back, and how jolly a fire of logs in the parlour would be, and what a supper he meant to eat; never noticing his companion's silence and distressful state of mind. At last, however, when they had gone some considerable way further, and were passing some tree-stumps at the edge of a copse that bordered the road, he stopped and said kindly, `Look here, Mole old chap, you seem dead tired. No talk left in you, and your feet dragging like lead. We'll sit down here for a minute and rest. The snow has held off so far, and the best part of our journey is over.' The Mole subsided forlornly on a tree-stump and tried to control himself, for he felt it surely coming. The sob he had fought with so long refused to be beaten. Up and up, it forced its way to the air, and then another, and another, and others thick and fast; till poor Mole at last gave up the struggle, and cried freely and helplessly and openly, now that he knew it was all over and he had lost what he could hardly be said to have found. The Rat, astonished and dismayed at the violence of Mole's paroxysm of grief, did not dare to speak for a while. At last he said, very quietly and sympathetically, `What is it, old fellow? Whatever can be the matter? Tell us your trouble, and let me see what I can do.' Poor Mole found it difficult to get any words out between the upheavals of his chest that followed one upon another so quickly and held back speech and choked it as it came. `I know it's a -- shabby, dingy little place,' he sobbed forth at last, brokenly: `not like -- your cosy quarters -- or Toad's beautiful hall -- or Badger's great house -- but it was my own little home -- and I was fond of it -- and I went away and forgot all about it -- and then I smelt it suddenly -- on the road, when I called and you wouldn't listen, Rat -- and everything came back to me with a rush -- and I wanted it! -- O dear, O dear! -- and when you wouldn't turn back, Ratty -- and I had to leave it, though I was smelling it all the time -- I thought my heart would break. -- We might have just gone and had one look at it, Ratty -- only one look -- it was close by -- but you wouldn't turn back, Ratty, you wouldn't turn back! O dear, O dear!' Recollection brought fresh waves of sorrow, and sobs again took full charge of him, preventing further speech. The Rat stared straight in front of him, saying nothing, only patting Mole gently on the shoulder. After a time he muttered gloomily, `I see it all now! What a pig I have been! A pig -- that's me! Just a pig -- a plain pig!' He waited till Mole's sobs became gradually less stormy and more rhythmical; he waited till at last sniffs were frequent and sobs only intermittent. Then he rose from his seat, and, remarking carelessly, `Well, now we'd really better be getting on, old chap!' set off up the road again, over the toilsome way they had come. `Wherever are you (hic) going to (hic), Ratty?' cried the tearful Mole, looking up in alarm. `We're going to find that home of yours, old fellow,' replied the Rat pleasantly; `so you had better come along, for it will take some finding, and we shall want your nose.' `Oh, come back, Ratty, do!' cried the Mole, getting up and hurrying after him. `It's no good, I tell you! It's too late, and too dark, and the place is too far off, and the snow's coming! And -- and I never meant to let you know I was feeling that way about it -- it was all an accident and a mistake! And think of River Bank, and your supper!' `Hang River Bank, and supper too!' said the Rat heartily. `I tell you, I'm going to find this place now, if I stay out all night. So cheer up, old chap, and take my arm, and we'll very soon be back there again.' Still snuffling, pleading, and reluctant, Mole suffered himself to be dragged back along the road by his imperious companion, who by a flow of cheerful talk and anecdote endeavoured to beguile his spirits back and make the weary way seem shorter. When at last it seemed to the Rat that they must be nearing that part of the road where the Mole had been `held up,' he said, `Now, no more talking. Business! Use your nose, and give your mind to it.' They moved on in silence for some little way, when suddenly the Rat was conscious, through his arm that was linked in Mole's, of a faint sort of electric thrill that was passing down that animal's body. Instantly he disengaged himself, fell back a pace, and waited, all attention. The signals were coming through! Mole stood a moment rigid, while his uplifted nose, quivering slightly, felt the air. Then a short, quick run forward -- a fault -- a check -- a try back; and then a slow, steady, confident advance. The Rat, much excited, kept close to his heels as the Mole, with something of the air of a sleep-walker, crossed a dry ditch, scrambled through a hedge, and nosed his way over a field open and trackless and bare in the faint starlight. Suddenly, without giving warning, he dived; but the Rat was on the alert, and promptly followed him down the tunnel to which his unerring nose had faithfully led him. It was close and airless, and the earthy smell was strong, and it seemed a long time to Rat ere the passage ended and he could stand erect and stretch and shake himself. The Mole struck a match, and by its light the Rat saw that they were standing in an open space, neatly swept and sanded underfoot, and directly facing them was Mole's little front door, with `Mole End' painted, in Gothic lettering, over the bell-pull at the side. Mole reached down a lantern from a nail on the wail and lit it, and the Rat, looking round him, saw that they were in a sort of fore-court. A garden-seat stood on one side of the door, and on the other a roller; for the Mole, who was a tidy animal when at home, could not stand having his ground kicked up by other animals into little runs that ended in earth-heaps. On the walls hung wire baskets with ferns in them, alternating with brackets carrying plaster statuary -- Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy. Down on one side of the forecourt ran a skittle-alley, with benches along it and little wooden tables marked with rings that hinted at beer-mugs. In the middle was a small round pond containing gold-fish and surrounded by a cockle-shell border. Out of the centre of the pond rose a fanciful erection clothed in more cockle-shells and topped by a large silvered glass ball that reflected everything all wrong and had a very pleasing effect. Mole's face-beamed at the sight of all these objects so dear to him, and he hurried Rat through the door, lit a lamp in the hall, and took one glance round his old home. He saw the dust lying thick on everything, saw the cheerless, deserted look of the long-neglected house, and its narrow, meagre dimensions, its worn and shabby contents -- and collapsed again on a hall-chair, his nose to his paws. `O Ratty!' he cried dismally, `why ever did I do it? Why did I bring you to this poor, cold little place, on a night like this, when you might have been at River Bank by this time, toasting your toes before a blazing fire, with all your own nice things about you!' The Rat paid no heed to his doleful self-reproaches. He was running here and there, opening doors, inspecting rooms and cupboards, and lighting lamps and candles and sticking them, up everywhere. `What a capital little house this is!' he called out cheerily. `So compact! So well planned! Everything here and everything in its place! We'll make a jolly night of it. The first thing we want is a good fire; I'll see to that -- I always know where to find things. So this is the parlour? Splendid! Your own idea, those little sleeping-bunks in the wall? Capital! Now, I'll fetch the wood and the coals, and you get a duster, Mole -- you'll find one in the drawer of the kitchen table -- and try and smarten things up a bit. Bustle about, old chap!' Return to top of page Edward R. Murrow On June 28, 1954, Murrow received the annual Freedom House Award with the citation: "Free men were heartened by his courage in exposing those who would divide us by exploiting our fears." In accepting this award, he delivered the following speech. (In the spring of 1975, on the occasion of the Merrill Prize Speaking Contest, I delivered this speech before the student body and faculty of the Phillips Exeter Academy.) Appropriate response to this generous and gracious citation would appear to require the eloquence of the ancients on some aspect of freedom. But there is little new to be said; the words have been better said by others; the challenge we face today has been faced before. Freedom is not to be bought in the bargain basement-- nor for a lump sum-- it must be paid for and argued about by each succeeding generation. Weapons may change, maps may be altered, alliances falter; but freedom remains the continuing concern of men and women who are conscious of their heritage and who would remain free. Freedom may be hammered to death on the anvil of war; or it may be nibbled away, or wither from neglect; or come to be regarded as a luxury we can't afford. With your permission, I shall talk briefly about how much freedom we can afford, in the context of the fearsome, frightened time in which we live. One of the pitfalls into which freedom can fall is in our thinking that any national or world emergency justifies putting curbs on freedom. We all recognize that in wartime, when national survival is at stake, it could be dangerous to take chances with extreme activities in the opposition. We do not know how great a peril the dissenters may prove to be. They could weaken the war effort; they might by themselves destroy security. It would take time to give them the benefit of the doubt, or search their motives in length legal procedures. Time is short in a war, and it is the general feeling that it is better to suspend some individual rights for a while than to endanger the whole community. But it is generally understood that this can be tolerated only while survival is at stake. When the emergency is over, a democracy expects to return to its normal practices and to the full protection of minorities and individuals. That is, when danger is sufficiently acute-- when victory means survival-- a democracy can decide not to be completely democratic but does so in the assurance that when the emergency ends it will promptly return to its true character. It doesn't always turn out that way. After the First World War the drive for conformity persisted in this country and some time was needed for the advocates of democracy to take over from the impatient and headstrong enemies of dissent. There was an ugly time when individual rights were being cut down without national survival serving as a justification. The test of the validity of reducing freedom in a democracy is not simply danger; it is the immediacy of the danger. It takes time to practice democracy, and in an acute danger there just may not be time for slow democratic ways. So the question we need to answer today is whether the danger we now face is no near that we no longer have time to be democratic. During the hot war we felt that we did not have it. Do we have it in a cold war? You will recognize that all the curbs on freedom advocated or imposed today are justified or excused on the ground that we are in a cold war and that our survival is just as much at stake as in a hot war. That may well be so. But it isn't so that we have no time in the cold war. We have plenty of it. The cold war isn't being decided soon; it may not be for a lifetime. Just let your mind run over the recent instances when individual freedom has been curtailed or overridden and ask yourselves whether there has not been plenty of time to enforce the laws in normal democratic ways, without in any way threatening national survival. There has been no pressing need for self-appointed crusaders to replace the courts and to prosecute and condemn dissenters in committees, or in the newspapers, or on television or radio. Many individuals have been cruelly punished. I am thinking of those who have not been placed behind prison bars after a trial but of those who have been stigmatized as though branded for life with a hot iron. More than a few have been rendered permanently unemployable and have been relegated to a condition of social inferiority like India's untouchables. I am not saying that none of these was guilty. How should I know? I only say that it was not democratic to punish them without a fair trial. In a hot war it may be unsafe to try to maintain the military effort and all the democratic principles at the same time. In a cold war it not only is safe, it seems to me imperative to do so. For one of the elements of our power in the cold war is our democracy and the sincerity with which we live it. For our democracy is the chief remaining guarantee of the safety of freedom anywhere. I say it actually endangers our national security and reduces our chances of survival as a democracy if we throw this asset away or impair it. If an atmosphere is created in which dissent and independent individual thinking are penalized, the tendency of the citizen will be to avoid trouble. He can be safe on his job, enjoy the approval of his neighbors and be immune from misinterpretation and persecution simply by saying nothing. And if enough citizens say nothing, the result is nationwide conformity. That may be pleasing to those who don't understand democracy or value it, but nationwide conformity means a static society, one that has lost the initiative to change itself. The only way such a static society changes is by the examples set or by the pronouncements made by those who have become the self-appointed, fear-breeding arbiters of what is right and what is wrong. If we become a static society, we lose one of the basic functions of democracy, the freedom to change. It is a truism that democracy is a means of dealing with the human imperfections of society. It recognizes that no form of government is perfect, no administration can be faultless, no legal system beyond improvement, no economic order as good as it might be. Where there is imperfection there must be change. And to produce change, unless it is imposed by tyranny, there must be difference of opinion; there must be opposition; there must be pioneer thinking; there must be freedom to criticize; there must be the unremitting conflict and testing of ideas. This undoubtedly involves a great deal of confusion. But the liveliness of a democracy can be measured by the activity of the minds of its citizens. Security and serenity in a democracy are not at all the same thing. They may even be opposites. Those who think that since we are in a cold war we are committed to conformity may not realize that they are asking to make democracy dormant, and that a dormant democracy is really on the way to becoming a tyranny. If our democracy is kept dormant for as long as the cold war continues, the end will be a world in which two tyrannies confront each other. The test of military power between them may not have been risked, but the ideological struggle will be over. The free world will have ceased to be free. So one of our troubles is knowing how to appraise and measure the emergency. I yield to no one in my desire to root out subversion. But I insist on a broad definition for subversion. I call subversion anything that subverts our political order, whether it is giving active aid to an enemy or curtailing the freedom of democracy to deal with its own imperfections. We must know that democracy cannot be kept alive by putting it to sleep. We have to be just as much engrossed with promoting its vigor and liveliness as its military security. One freedom that does not make sense, even in a cold war, is the freedom to reduce freedom. And I am not thinking of the inherent necessity for restraints if freedom is to thrive. Obviously, freedom that is not responsible is mere willfulness, and is not what I am talking about. But when freedom takes it upon itself to reduce itself permanently, or for as long as a cold war lasts, it is in the initial stages of self-destruction. There is a false formula for personal security being peddled in our market place. It is this, although not so labeled: Don't join anything; don't associate; don't write; don't take a chance on being wrong; don't espouse unpopular causes; button your lip and drift with the tide; seek the ease and luxury of complete equanimity by refusing to make up your minds about issues that wiser heads will one day decide. This product, if it be bought by enough people, leads to paralysis. We must, I think, for our very lives remember that freedom will reside and flourish here in this generous and capacious land, or it will survive nowhere on this minor planet. Our strength in this continuing conflict with the forces of evil lies not alone in bombs and planes and physical courage. We must have stable ground upon which to stand and fight, if fight we must. Nations have been known to destroy their freedom while preparing to defend it. We are the head of a grand alliance of freedom loving people. They have joined with us because they believe it is in their own self interest, and because we are strong. But there is another reason for their joining their fate with ours. We are free, and whatever we do to limit or foreshorten that freedom will reduce by that much our reservoir of goodwill abroad. There is no such thing as a Voice of America. That voice is made up of senators, and admirals, and clergymen, the Supreme Court, the price of wheat on the big board in Chicago, trade policies, race relations. There is no longer such a thing as a purely domestic news story; each is a part of the voice of this country abroad. And if that collective voice tells the story of reduced freedom, of a tyranny of silence, of a fear of change, then within measurable time we shall find ourselves a great, powerful continental island off the coast of Kamchatka, with the rest of the world either united against us or indifferent to our fate. Our example, our demonstration of freedom in action, may be more powerful than our dollars, more persuasive than the threat of our bombs. We must continue to provide ourselves and our allies with that most dangerous and explosive force known to mankind-- knowledge. And no man and no group may be permitted to chart in advance the course or the books to be followed in pursuit of that knowledge. We live in a time of fear and prejudice, and freedom is hard-pressed both at home and abroad. But freedom will survive and flourish unless it be destroyed by the consent of the free. I say consent, for acquiescence or silence is a form of consent. I believe that there may be more acquiescence than is healthy because too many people have mistakenly thought it was necessary to be undemocratic to deal with the emergency. They have thought there wasn't time to be both safe and free. No more fateful mistake can be made. For in the cold war, there is no safety whatever unless we remain free. Democracy is our one chance of survival. For if we emerge from the long crisis undevestated by total war but no longer free, we have but chosen the cheapest and least heroic way to give tyranny the victory. Return to top of page |
