Well, again I will try to read something pleasanter than that.
Is everybody cheerful?
Light up a Lucky, relax.
I'll read a poem about a moth, maybe that's light enough.
I used to live in a little old hand-made farmhouse out back
of Rochester, New York.
And when I moved in there, one of the--
I guess the hands that made it either
had been long dead or not too skilled, I don't know.
When we came to move in, one of the neighbors
came around he said, "you're going to move in that house?"
He says what, "come winter the windows skin
the rug right off your floor."
He'd been in the house.
It didn't matter too much though.
I was only an instructor then and we didn't own a rug.
[CHUCKLES]
I can't find the poem, wait a minute.
Where did it go?
Nobody leave this room till I find that poem.
What's the title of that unforgettable poem?
[LAUGHTER]
There it is, 15, I went right past it six times.
Yeah, there it is.
All right, and you know, so we moved in there.
If you live in a house like that,
you've got a shot at wisdom.
I don't mean you'll probably get it, but you've got a shot at it
and that's better than how things usually are.
Of course, you know what Escola said about--
man grows wise against his will in a house like that,
you sure don't get your will.
I mean, everything that you want to keep in is going out,
everything you want to keep out it's coming in.
And you live with the universe passing through the living
room.
And you don't like it, but it may teach you something.
Well, most of the things that teach you something you
don't like.
The kind of house that anybody has if they get their own way,
is going to have walls that thick and double windows
and carpets this deep and armchairs
about twice the size of this lecture.
And you start sinking and you're falling back
into that armchair for five minutes,
and when you hit the bottom, what you do
is you hook up the IV tubes and turn on the television
and then you never move again except to holler at the girl
and see is she bringing the beer on time.
Sort of a womb with a television set and--
[LAUGHTER]
Which is great if you can get it,
but instructors can't get it yet so they go on.
Learning is at least still accessible to them.
You've got the television and the newspapers
to-- well, you've got all those walls to shut the world out
and the newspaper and television to lie to you about it
and it's marvelous.
But well, in that kind of house, no.
I had the feeling that moths were
especially subject to the kind of behavior
that I was worried about.
Every one of them used to get himself--
I swear every moth in that county
got outside my study window every night beating
his little wings madly, his eyes gleaming
with that insane desire to get in there, [LAUGHTER]
and quite a lot of them made it.
But the weird thing about them was
that those moths that had made it were 10 times much more
desperate to get back out for very much better reasons.
I decided I didn't know anyone quite so human as moths.
It's called "Lying Awake."
"This moth caught in the room tonight, squirmed up,
sniper style between the rusty edges of the screen,
then, long as the room stayed light,
lay here, content in some corner hole.
Now that we have settled into bed though, he can't sleep.
Overhead, he hurls himself at the blank wall.
Each night hordes of these flutterers
haunt and climb my study window pane.
Fired by reflection, their insane eyes gleam,
they know what they want.
How do the petulant things survive?
Out in the fields I have a place, and proper work,
furthering the race.
Why this blind fanatical drive indoors?
Why rush at every spark, cigar, headlamp
railway warning to knock off your wings
and starve by morning?
And what could a moth fear in the dark
compared to what you meet inside?
Still he rams the fluorescent face of the clock,
thinks that's another place of light and families
where he'll hide.
We'd ought to trap him in a jar, or come
like the white coats with a net and turn him out toward living.
Yet, we don't, we take things as they are."