P.S. (24 page)

I am afraid art is very, very pale compared to real life sometimes, very pale indeed.

 

[Sound of sitar playing]

 

GEORGIA TURNER: If it takes me to lay down and get out of there and get down on my knees in that water—I had to crawl with the dogs and hogs and things—so that my children could
have a better day that I had, then I don’t mind doing it. And if it takes me to have to lay down and go on home to my Father, I don’t mind doing that, so my children can get their freedom . . .

 

[Mahalia Jackson singing “Hands on the Plow”]

 

TURNER: I don’t want my children to have the time I had. I had a time, children, y’all don’t know. Don’t nobody know what a time I had. Oh, no.

 

[Mahalia Jackson singing “Hands on the Plow”]

 

JOHN CIARDI: You have to hear those best voices . . .

 

 

CIARDI: When I was a kid, my uncle used to have a tremendous collection of those scratchy old orthophonic Caruso recordings. And especially on rainy days, but all the time, I had a passion for Caruso. I heard him a couple of times live, but even on scratchy recordings—I remember him best on scratchy recordings . . .

 

[Caruso singing]

 

CIARDI: . . . because my memory of that is longest. But when you heard this voice, you not only heard the songs being sung; you suffered an expansion of your imagination. You discovered how well it was possible to sing these songs. Your very imagination was enlarged; you had a larger sense of expectation. You couldn’t have anticipated these songs could have
been sung so well. On two levels: in the first place you’d think just in the animal quality of the singing, Caruso would hit a high note and you’d think this is as much as the human voice can do; you couldn’t ask more of the human voice. And then he’d be beyond that; he’d exceed the expectation. But there’s another thing: it took centuries to form the kind of consciousness that would sing these songs in this way; the kind of musical intelligence that touched the songs perfectly at every moment. We’re enlarged by it.

You have to hear those best voices. You have to open your imagination to Job asking his question, and when you have really heard that question
ringing
, you know the difference between a great question and a lesser one. Then you know the size of a human decision.

 

BERTRAND RUSSELL: As human beings, we have to remember that if the issues between the East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody—whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European, or American, whether white or black—then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West. There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress and happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise. If you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

 

 

BUCKMINSTER FULLER: I said if Einstein is right, in due course, then, he is going to affect the other scientists, and the other scientists are going to affect all technology, and they’re going to finally affect society. If that is so, why don’t we look ahead? And part of this, earlier, when I spoke to you about a transcendental position, one of the things I said was let’s go ahead and see what the world would be like if Einstein is right. . . . That year—let’s see, we’re talking about 1935—a few months later, Lise Meitner and her associate developed the first concept of fission—very shortly after that comes fission—and Einstein, then, when they were pretty sure that they had it, was asked to go to talk to Mr. Roosevelt about it, you may remember: the only man who could probably convince Mr. Roosevelt of its really important aspects. When fission was developed, then it proved Einstein’s formula to be right: the amount of energy in the various masses proved to be exactly what his formula said. Therefore, the first practical application was a bomb to destroy man. I don’t think it hit the people in Hiroshima as hard as it hit Mr. Einstein. I think he was really shocked. And he became, really, the scientist who alone really stood up; he, in his last days, did everything possible to try to make science think about its responsibilities. . . .

 

ALBERT EINSTEIN: We are gathered here at Princeton; this institution of research and scholarship represents a spiritual bond encompassing all countries. I am grateful to all for assisting us in our work. . . .

 

NICOLAI POGODIN [Speaking Russian; his interpreter translates]: We have a series published in the Soviet Union of books about great people, and I just happened to read the one about Einstein. . . . And after reading this book—it was like a novel
to me; I read it day, night, day, night, until I finished it—and then I decided I have to write about this man. . . .

 

 

POGODIN: But I want to say that the image of this great man has terribly impressed me as a human being. . . . This man has something in him which is so humane, so superb. The idea which is guiding me in this play is his tragedy; a tragedy in the Greek interpretation of this definition: he is guilty, but he is not guilty. The main idea by which I am guided and which is actually giving the tragedy its subjet is the following: that this great man came to us from the future into the present. It was tragically difficult for this man to live in this troubled world . . . divided and hostile world. I went to Princeton like a pilgrim goes to Mecca.

 

SEAN O’CASEY: It’s an odd thing. Politics—I don’t know why, but they seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while Nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us closer together. The last gift that Nature has given us, a really extraordinary one, a very dangerous one, a very beautiful one, is the atom bomb. Nature, through the atom bomb, says, “Here you are: the power of darkness or the power of light. Choose what you wish.” And mankind is going to choose the power of light!

 

ARTHUR C. CLARKE: I hope that we will make the wise choice, because everybody has agreed that the choice has to be made; and that extinction is the possibility of our generation—the first generation of mankind that’s ever had this possibility in front of it . . .

 

 

CLARKE: When you look out at the universe, there are a hundred thousand million suns in this galaxy of ours alone. And if only, say, one in ten has got planets, that may mean that to every single person on this earth, there’s somewhere an inhabited world—that’s about the number of inhabited worlds in this universe, one for every man, woman, and child on this earth—well, it seems very unlikely that on many of those there won’t be races that would regard us as being somewhere back in the Stone Age.

 

 

CLARKE: Well, I mean morally, intellectually, philosophically, technically . . .

 

 

CLARKE: Well, a superior race cannot have war because war is a self-liquidating activity. . . . And I am optimistic about the outcome.

 

 

CLARKE: Yes.

 

 

CLARKE: The choice is ours. And it’s really a privilege to be born in this age, the most critical in the whole history of
mankind. I remember the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Well, that curse has been visited on us, but I don’t think it really is a curse. It’s a privilege.

 

 

CLARKE: It could be.

 

HARLOW SHAPLEY: I’ve often wondered who would inherit the earth. We understand that the meek may inherit the earth; and, of course, that leaves us out. Will it be mammals, or will it be fish, or insects? . . .

 

 

SHAPLEY: In wondering about the future, and without actually trying to make a horoscope of humanity or of life on the earth, I have just tried to list down, sometimes, what are the risks we suffer. What will eliminate man, if he is eliminated from the surface of the earth? Will it be the sun running down, or blowing up; either one of those? Freezing man out or incinerating him? No, because the sun’s a good steady star, and as you know it’s pretty well thermostated to run for, say, ten thousand million years at its present rate. So the sun isn’t going to play out. How about stars colliding with us? No, they’re too far apart. Collisions happen too infrequently. Say, in the next thousand centuries: no, no chance of that. I mean a very low chance. Well, what about the earth getting out of its orbit and running away and freezing to death in empty space? Or plunging into the sun and boiling up? No chance. We know from our celestial mechanics that the orbit of the earth is constant,
and will stay just about put. And so, I think we’re safe from sun, from star, from earth. So now, must I say that it looks pretty safe for man for this future you talk about for the next thousand centuries? Yes? No! Because he has one deadly enemy that I didn’t mention; an enemy that’s at his throat and may succeed in returning him to the fossils and leaving life on the earth to the cockroaches and the kelp. You know what that enemy is, of course? That’s man himself.

 

[Myoka Harubasa’s despairing voice, then the Weavers singing]

[Gradually a cello builds beneath the following words]

 

ALEXANDER ELIOT: This picture of the two men clobbering each other in the quicksand in the valley, at the Prado, is first of all a horrible picture; a shocking picture. After that you begin to see it within the context of this magnificent landscape: all a silver, somber, magnificently harmonious thing . . . and in the midst of it are these two bloody idiots. And you see that if you could only get through to them somehow, and tell them what they’re doing, and how they are denying by their very action the beauty and the harmony and the mystery that surrounds them—they’re denying the fact that they’re equally children of God, equally brothers—somehow they would recognize what Goya so poignantly makes you realize in looking at the picture.

LILLIAN SMITH: “Who am I?” “Where am I going?” “What is death?” “Who is God?” “Why am I here?” . . . Here now we all ask; children ask, and the Greeks ask, and existential philosophers ask, and every thoughtful person: “Who am I?”

 

[The Weavers sing]

 

“On a fine November day in 1945, late in the afternoon, I was landed on an airstrip in southern Japan. I did not know that we had left the open country until, unexpectedly, I heard the ship’s loudspeakers broadcasting dance music.”

 

[We hear strains of “Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”]

 

“Then, suddenly, I was aware that we were already at the center of damage in Nagasaki. The shadows behind me were the skeleton of the Mitsubishi factory building, pushed backwards and sidewise as if by a giant hand. What I had thought to be broken rocks was a concrete powerhouse with its roof punched in. I could make out nothing but cockeyed telegraph poles, and loops of wire in a bare waste of ashes. I had blundered into this desolate landscape as instantly as one might wake among the mountains of the moon. The moment of recognition when I realized that I was already in Nagasaki is present to me as I write as vividly as when I lived it. I see the
warm night and the meaningless shapes. I can even remember the tune that was coming from the ship.”

 

[We hear the lyrics: “Yes, I’m gonna ask him: Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?”]

 

“This dissertation was born at that moment. For the moment I recall was a universal moment. What I met was almost as abruptly the experience of mankind. On an evening sometime in 1945, each of us in his own way learned that his imagination had been dwarfed. We looked up and saw the power of which we had been proud loom over us like the ruins of Nagasaki. The power of science for good and for evil has troubled other minds than ours. We are not here fumbling with a new dilemma; our subject and our fears are as old as the toolmaking civilizations. Nothing happened except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man. And conscience for an instant became immediate to us. Let us acknowledge our subject for what it is: civilization, face-to-face with its own implications. The implications are both the industrial slum which Nagasaki was before it was bombed, and the ashy desolation which the bomb made of the slum. And civilization asks of both ruins: [Pause] Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?”

 

REV. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN JR.: Let us pray. [Pause] Lord, number us, we beseech thee, in the ranks of those who went forth from this university longing only for those things for which thou dost make us long; men for whom the complexity of issues only serve to renew their zeal to deal with them; men who alleviated pain by sharing it; and the men who were always willing to risk something big for something good. So may we leave in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, a
little more beauty than would have been there had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not, but still could be. Oh, God, take our minds and think through them; take our lips and speak through them; and take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.