WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.500 align:middle line:90% 00:00:01.500 --> 00:00:07.365 align:middle line:90% Now I want to read a war poem. 00:00:07.365 --> 00:00:09.900 align:middle line:90% 00:00:09.900 --> 00:00:13.230 align:middle line:84% And I'll give you a footnote on this that no scholar has 00:00:13.230 --> 00:00:15.310 align:middle line:90% thought to write yet. 00:00:15.310 --> 00:00:19.710 align:middle line:84% This is called "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment." 00:00:19.710 --> 00:00:23.100 align:middle line:84% "You would think the fury of aerial bombardment 00:00:23.100 --> 00:00:26.190 align:middle line:90% would rouse God to relent. 00:00:26.190 --> 00:00:29.820 align:middle line:84% The infinite spaces are still silent. 00:00:29.820 --> 00:00:33.660 align:middle line:90% He looks on shock-pried faces. 00:00:33.660 --> 00:00:37.350 align:middle line:84% History even does not know what is meant. 00:00:37.350 --> 00:00:40.710 align:middle line:84% You would feel that after so many centuries 00:00:40.710 --> 00:00:44.130 align:middle line:90% God would give man to repent. 00:00:44.130 --> 00:00:49.020 align:middle line:84% Yet He can kill as Cain could but with multitudinous 00:00:49.020 --> 00:00:54.060 align:middle line:84% will no farther advanced than in his ancient furies. 00:00:54.060 --> 00:00:58.590 align:middle line:84% Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity? 00:00:58.590 --> 00:01:04.410 align:middle line:84% Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all? 00:01:04.410 --> 00:01:09.060 align:middle line:84% Is the eternal truth man's fighting soul 00:01:09.060 --> 00:01:13.410 align:middle line:84% wherein the beast ravens in its own avidity? 00:01:13.410 --> 00:01:18.420 align:middle line:84% Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill, names 00:01:18.420 --> 00:01:22.320 align:middle line:84% on a list, whose faces I do not recall. 00:01:22.320 --> 00:01:27.240 align:middle line:84% But they are gone to early death, who late in school 00:01:27.240 --> 00:01:30.690 align:middle line:84% distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding 00:01:30.690 --> 00:01:33.060 align:middle line:90% pawl." 00:01:33.060 --> 00:01:35.760 align:middle line:84% Well I'd like to tell you that in the second line at the end 00:01:35.760 --> 00:01:37.260 align:middle line:84% and the beginning of the third there 00:01:37.260 --> 00:01:39.810 align:middle line:84% are six simple English words, the infinite spaces 00:01:39.810 --> 00:01:41.820 align:middle line:90% are still silent. 00:01:41.820 --> 00:01:45.060 align:middle line:84% Which you take right in and pass right over. 00:01:45.060 --> 00:01:48.000 align:middle line:84% On the other hand, these are a translation 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:53.550 align:middle line:84% remembered many years later from a sentence in Pascal's Pensees 00:01:53.550 --> 00:01:57.390 align:middle line:84% which I read in Paris as a young man. 00:01:57.390 --> 00:02:01.020 align:middle line:84% Pascal only lived to be 40 years old or 39 or 41, 00:02:01.020 --> 00:02:02.640 align:middle line:90% somewhere around in there. 00:02:02.640 --> 00:02:05.520 align:middle line:84% In the great philosopher at the end of his life 00:02:05.520 --> 00:02:08.520 align:middle line:84% would look up at the stars and contemplate 00:02:08.520 --> 00:02:11.760 align:middle line:84% the vast distances between stars. 00:02:11.760 --> 00:02:14.940 align:middle line:84% And he would realize this shortness of our stay 00:02:14.940 --> 00:02:16.500 align:middle line:90% on this Earth. 00:02:16.500 --> 00:02:18.720 align:middle line:90% And he feared. 00:02:18.720 --> 00:02:25.650 align:middle line:84% He had-- he was frightened at the mortal condition. 00:02:25.650 --> 00:02:28.770 align:middle line:84% And his sentence, if I can remember it or part in French 00:02:28.770 --> 00:02:37.470 align:middle line:84% is, "Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie." 00:02:37.470 --> 00:02:41.700 align:middle line:90% 00:02:41.700 --> 00:02:46.950 align:middle line:84% Le silence eternel des ces espaces inifinis m'effraie. 00:02:46.950 --> 00:02:49.830 align:middle line:90% 00:02:49.830 --> 00:02:53.780 align:middle line:84% Someday they will put a footnote into that.