Now I want to read a war poem.
And I'll give you a footnote on this that no scholar has
thought to write yet.
This is called "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment."
"You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
would rouse God to relent.
The infinite spaces are still silent.
He looks on shock-pried faces.
History even does not know what is meant.
You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent.
Yet He can kill as Cain could but with multitudinous
will no farther advanced than in his ancient furies.
Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man's fighting soul
wherein the beast ravens in its own avidity?
Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill, names
on a list, whose faces I do not recall.
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding
pawl."
Well I'd like to tell you that in the second line at the end
and the beginning of the third there
are six simple English words, the infinite spaces
are still silent.
Which you take right in and pass right over.
On the other hand, these are a translation
remembered many years later from a sentence in Pascal's Pensees
which I read in Paris as a young man.
Pascal only lived to be 40 years old or 39 or 41,
somewhere around in there.
In the great philosopher at the end of his life
would look up at the stars and contemplate
the vast distances between stars.
And he would realize this shortness of our stay
on this Earth.
And he feared.
He had-- he was frightened at the mortal condition.
And his sentence, if I can remember it or part in French
is, "Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie."
Le silence eternel des ces espaces inifinis m'effraie.
Someday they will put a footnote into that.