WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.840 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.840 --> 00:00:05.070 align:middle line:84% And I want to read a Southern poem-- 00:00:05.070 --> 00:00:09.660 align:middle line:90% 00:00:09.660 --> 00:00:10.425 align:middle line:90% "Old Mansion." 00:00:10.425 --> 00:00:16.430 align:middle line:90% 00:00:16.430 --> 00:00:26.870 align:middle line:84% I know that everyone knows that some of our lunch hour gang 00:00:26.870 --> 00:00:36.410 align:middle line:84% went into the writing of a book about the old country 00:00:36.410 --> 00:00:40.160 align:middle line:90% style of culture in the South. 00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:42.950 align:middle line:84% We had our fingers crossed knowing 00:00:42.950 --> 00:00:51.200 align:middle line:84% we wouldn't turn the clock back, but we liked the country life 00:00:51.200 --> 00:00:54.360 align:middle line:90% better than the industrial life. 00:00:54.360 --> 00:00:59.060 align:middle line:84% But we knew very well the power, the force, 00:00:59.060 --> 00:01:03.410 align:middle line:90% was sweeping us into that tide. 00:01:03.410 --> 00:01:10.510 align:middle line:90% And I don't dare to condemn it. 00:01:10.510 --> 00:01:15.080 align:middle line:84% Ought to have tried to get in its path and oppose it. 00:01:15.080 --> 00:01:17.090 align:middle line:84% We don't know what we are coming to, 00:01:17.090 --> 00:01:21.000 align:middle line:84% but we are making tremendous strides. 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:23.150 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:01:23.150 --> 00:01:24.020 align:middle line:90% Some way or other. 00:01:24.020 --> 00:01:26.930 align:middle line:90% 00:01:26.930 --> 00:01:31.520 align:middle line:84% I have found that though I live in Ohio 00:01:31.520 --> 00:01:37.040 align:middle line:84% on the top altitude in Ohio, there's 00:01:37.040 --> 00:01:42.440 align:middle line:84% no hilltop that's higher than 1450 feet. 00:01:42.440 --> 00:01:46.520 align:middle line:84% That's just the height of the highest place on our hilltop. 00:01:46.520 --> 00:01:48.860 align:middle line:84% It's very much like the Garden of Eden to me. 00:01:48.860 --> 00:01:53.300 align:middle line:84% It's a pretty country and a nice community. 00:01:53.300 --> 00:02:01.010 align:middle line:84% And the rules of the academic faculty are so generous. 00:02:01.010 --> 00:02:04.550 align:middle line:84% And they are so kindly disposed to each other. 00:02:04.550 --> 00:02:07.700 align:middle line:84% Where they fight it's terrible, but we don't have those fights. 00:02:07.700 --> 00:02:08.600 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:02:08.600 --> 00:02:11.300 align:middle line:84% And sometimes I just feel it is not 00:02:11.300 --> 00:02:15.230 align:middle line:84% my business to get worried over the political situation, 00:02:15.230 --> 00:02:19.635 align:middle line:84% or the financial, and industrial situation 00:02:19.635 --> 00:02:23.630 align:middle line:90% of the progress of the world. 00:02:23.630 --> 00:02:29.090 align:middle line:84% Though I always take an intense interest in the National 00:02:29.090 --> 00:02:32.780 align:middle line:90% election of the president. 00:02:32.780 --> 00:02:34.640 align:middle line:84% I always say I'm independent, but I 00:02:34.640 --> 00:02:36.095 align:middle line:90% keep voting for the same party. 00:02:36.095 --> 00:02:38.630 align:middle line:90% 00:02:38.630 --> 00:02:43.750 align:middle line:90% But 00:02:43.750 --> 00:02:48.770 align:middle line:90% I decided that I must not-- 00:02:48.770 --> 00:02:50.150 align:middle line:90% I could not, now-- 00:02:50.150 --> 00:02:53.930 align:middle line:84% keep out of the completest knowledge 00:02:53.930 --> 00:02:59.840 align:middle line:84% that I had time to gain about the rate of our progress, 00:02:59.840 --> 00:03:01.100 align:middle line:90% and its direction. 00:03:01.100 --> 00:03:03.770 align:middle line:90% 00:03:03.770 --> 00:03:06.890 align:middle line:84% It's an immense field, and so my wife 00:03:06.890 --> 00:03:12.530 align:middle line:84% and I take a number of magazines and weekly papers, 00:03:12.530 --> 00:03:17.880 align:middle line:84% weekly journals, to keep abreast of that. 00:03:17.880 --> 00:03:22.100 align:middle line:84% However this is looking backward. 00:03:22.100 --> 00:03:28.370 align:middle line:84% This is a little piece of homesickness, a nostalgia, 00:03:28.370 --> 00:03:31.160 align:middle line:90% called "Old Mansion." 00:03:31.160 --> 00:03:34.100 align:middle line:84% And many of you would know it at once 00:03:34.100 --> 00:03:42.860 align:middle line:84% before I had finished two quatrains that I was deeply 00:03:42.860 --> 00:03:46.070 align:middle line:84% imitating the style of Henry James. 00:03:46.070 --> 00:03:46.880 align:middle line:90% And that was true. 00:03:46.880 --> 00:03:49.440 align:middle line:90% I was infatuated with his style. 00:03:49.440 --> 00:03:55.730 align:middle line:84% I thought it very poetic, and used it. 00:03:55.730 --> 00:04:00.500 align:middle line:84% It puts a few extra words that could be spared into the poem. 00:04:00.500 --> 00:04:03.860 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:04:03.860 --> 00:04:05.780 align:middle line:90% 00:04:05.780 --> 00:04:10.100 align:middle line:84% "As an intruder I trudged with careful innocence 00:04:10.100 --> 00:04:14.840 align:middle line:84% to mask indecency a meddlesome stare. 00:04:14.840 --> 00:04:18.950 align:middle line:84% Passing the old house of an honest eminence. 00:04:18.950 --> 00:04:24.800 align:middle line:84% Exhaling my foreign weed on its weighted air. 00:04:24.800 --> 00:04:30.650 align:middle line:84% Here age seemed newly imaged for the historian, 00:04:30.650 --> 00:04:34.910 align:middle line:84% after his monstrous chateaux on the Loire. 00:04:34.910 --> 00:04:38.810 align:middle line:84% A beauty not for depicting by old vulgarian 00:04:38.810 --> 00:04:43.070 align:middle line:84% reiterations the gentle readers abhor." 00:04:43.070 --> 00:04:49.190 align:middle line:84% Of course, James spent 20 years after he went to England 00:04:49.190 --> 00:04:51.050 align:middle line:90% before he came back to America. 00:04:51.050 --> 00:04:54.590 align:middle line:84% And came back to visit America in an attempt to size 00:04:54.590 --> 00:04:58.850 align:middle line:84% up the culture of America as compared with that of Britain. 00:04:58.850 --> 00:05:00.800 align:middle line:84% And he found it better than he had expected. 00:05:00.800 --> 00:05:03.450 align:middle line:90% 00:05:03.450 --> 00:05:05.180 align:middle line:84% I don't think he sampled it thoroughly. 00:05:05.180 --> 00:05:08.070 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:05:08.070 --> 00:05:17.340 align:middle line:84% But there I was consciously imitating myself in the respect 00:05:17.340 --> 00:05:23.970 align:middle line:84% that I had three years in England as a Rhodes scholar, 00:05:23.970 --> 00:05:27.600 align:middle line:84% and then another year in England as a Guggenheim fellow. 00:05:27.600 --> 00:05:30.750 align:middle line:90% 00:05:30.750 --> 00:05:34.560 align:middle line:84% And in between, I had two years-- 00:05:34.560 --> 00:05:36.270 align:middle line:90% exactly two years to the day-- 00:05:36.270 --> 00:05:42.660 align:middle line:84% from New York back to New York in the French artillery 00:05:42.660 --> 00:05:44.940 align:middle line:90% section. 00:05:44.940 --> 00:05:48.360 align:middle line:84% Either teaching the Americans or at the front, 00:05:48.360 --> 00:05:53.070 align:middle line:84% but mostly teaching Americans to let the French instructors 00:05:53.070 --> 00:05:54.015 align:middle line:90% go back to the war. 00:05:54.015 --> 00:05:57.540 align:middle line:90% 00:05:57.540 --> 00:06:00.390 align:middle line:84% So that I felt that I came back filled 00:06:00.390 --> 00:06:06.070 align:middle line:84% with a good measure of European culture. 00:06:06.070 --> 00:06:11.910 align:middle line:84% Though I greatly overestimated it, my knowledge of it. 00:06:11.910 --> 00:06:14.850 align:middle line:90% "It was a Southern manor. 00:06:14.850 --> 00:06:20.760 align:middle line:84% One hardly imagines towers, arcades, or forbidding fortress 00:06:20.760 --> 00:06:22.440 align:middle line:90% walls. 00:06:22.440 --> 00:06:27.450 align:middle line:84% But sufficient state, though it's peacocks now were pigeons. 00:06:27.450 --> 00:06:32.970 align:middle line:84% Where no courts kept, but grave rites and funerals. 00:06:32.970 --> 00:06:38.520 align:middle line:84% Indeed, not distant, possibly not external to the property, 00:06:38.520 --> 00:06:41.790 align:middle line:84% were tombstones where the catafalque 00:06:41.790 --> 00:06:44.160 align:middle line:90% had carried their dead. 00:06:44.160 --> 00:06:49.050 align:middle line:84% And projected a note too charnel but for the honeysuckle 00:06:49.050 --> 00:06:52.320 align:middle line:90% on its intricate stalk. 00:06:52.320 --> 00:06:56.340 align:middle line:84% Stability it was the character of its rectangle. 00:06:56.340 --> 00:07:01.170 align:middle line:84% Whose line was seen in part, and guessed in part, through trees. 00:07:01.170 --> 00:07:04.380 align:middle line:90% 00:07:04.380 --> 00:07:07.590 align:middle line:84% Each time of seeing, I absorbed some other feature 00:07:07.590 --> 00:07:09.690 align:middle line:84% of a house whose annals in no wires 00:07:09.690 --> 00:07:12.570 align:middle line:90% could be brief, nor ignoble. 00:07:12.570 --> 00:07:17.040 align:middle line:84% For it expired as sweetly as nature with her tinge, 00:07:17.040 --> 00:07:20.970 align:middle line:90% as of oxidation, on autumn leaf. 00:07:20.970 --> 00:07:24.780 align:middle line:84% Decay was the tone of old brick and shingle. 00:07:24.780 --> 00:07:28.980 align:middle line:84% Green shutters dragging frightened the watchful heart 00:07:28.980 --> 00:07:30.270 align:middle line:90% to assert-- 00:07:30.270 --> 00:07:31.890 align:middle line:90% your mansion. 00:07:31.890 --> 00:07:34.290 align:middle line:90% Long and richly inhabited. 00:07:34.290 --> 00:07:37.200 align:middle line:84% In porches, its porches and bowers 00:07:37.200 --> 00:07:39.090 align:middle line:90% suiting the children of man. 00:07:39.090 --> 00:07:42.960 align:middle line:84% Will not forever be thus, old man exhibited, 00:07:42.960 --> 00:07:47.640 align:middle line:84% and one had best hurry to enter it if one can. 00:07:47.640 --> 00:07:52.170 align:middle line:84% And at last, with my happier angel's own temerity, 00:07:52.170 --> 00:07:56.100 align:middle line:84% did I clang their brazen knocker against the door. 00:07:56.100 --> 00:08:00.630 align:middle line:84% To beg their dole of a look in simple charity. 00:08:00.630 --> 00:08:04.920 align:middle line:84% Of crumbs of wisdom dropping from their great store. 00:08:04.920 --> 00:08:07.110 align:middle line:90% But it came to nothing. 00:08:07.110 --> 00:08:09.450 align:middle line:84% And may so gross denial, which had 00:08:09.450 --> 00:08:13.170 align:middle line:84% been deployed with the beating of the breast, never shortened 00:08:13.170 --> 00:08:16.950 align:middle line:84% the tired historian loyal to acknowledge 00:08:16.950 --> 00:08:20.820 align:middle line:90% defeat and discover a new quest. 00:08:20.820 --> 00:08:24.510 align:middle line:84% The old mistress was ill, and sent my dismissal 00:08:24.510 --> 00:08:27.510 align:middle line:84% by one even more rapid, and lean, 00:08:27.510 --> 00:08:30.750 align:middle line:84% and dark than that warped concierge. 00:08:30.750 --> 00:08:33.419 align:middle line:84% An imperturbable vassal who had bid 00:08:33.419 --> 00:08:38.309 align:middle line:84% may be gone from her master's Gothic park. 00:08:38.309 --> 00:08:41.700 align:middle line:84% Emphatically the old house crumbled. 00:08:41.700 --> 00:08:45.030 align:middle line:84% The ruins would litter, as already the leaves, 00:08:45.030 --> 00:08:47.610 align:middle line:90% this petted sward. 00:08:47.610 --> 00:08:52.050 align:middle line:84% And no annalist went into the lords or the peons. 00:08:52.050 --> 00:08:56.910 align:middle line:84% The antiquary would finger the bits of shard. 00:08:56.910 --> 00:09:00.720 align:middle line:84% But on retreating, I saw myself in the token. 00:09:00.720 --> 00:09:04.470 align:middle line:84% How loving from my dying weed the feather 00:09:04.470 --> 00:09:07.530 align:middle line:90% curled on the languid air. 00:09:07.530 --> 00:09:11.610 align:middle line:84% And I went with courage shaken to dip, alas, 00:09:11.610 --> 00:09:15.170 align:middle line:90% into some unseemly world." 00:09:15.170 --> 00:09:16.000 align:middle line:90%