by Studs Terkel
JAMES BALDWIN: I don’t ever intend to make my peace with such a world. There’s something much more important than Cadillacs, Frigidaires, and IBM machines, you know. And precisely one of the things that’s wrong is this notion that IBM machines and Cadillacs prove something. People are always telling me how many Negroes bought Cadillacs last year, and it terrifies me. I always wonder: Is this what you think the country is for? Do you think this is really what I came here and suffered and died for? A lousy Cadillac?
REV. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN JR.: Because we love the word, we pray now, oh, Father, for grace to quarrel with it, oh, thou, whose lover’s quarrel with the world is the history of the world . . .
An American University chaplain offering a prayer during commencement exercises . . .
COFFIN: Grant us grace to quarrel with the worship of success and power, with the assumption that people are less important than the jobs they hold. Grant us grace to quarrel with the mass culture that tends not to satisfy, but exploit the wants of people; to quarrel with those who pledge allegiance to one race, rather than the human race. Lord, grant us grace to quarrel with all that profanes, and trivializes, and separates men.
MIRIAM MAKEBA: In South Africa if you don’t have a sense of humor, it would be difficult to survive, with all that’s going on there.
Every once in a while, maybe once a year, we have a big feast where we slaughter a cow, or maybe two sheep, and we cook and invite all our neighbors and the people around us to meditate to our great-grandfathers and mothers who died, and ask them to ask the Lord to help us go on living. And then the people eat and drink and they dance, and then they go back to their homes. And so . . . we sing, and we’re happy . . . we try.
[Makeba singing]
WOMAN’S VOICE: After so many years, you know, in prisons, and in camp, and . . . and many years of this constant humiliation—the SS tried to convince us that there is no hope for us—we really started to believe that there was no hope for us—we really started to believe that there was no hope for us . . .
A former inmate of the Ravensbruck concentration camp . . .
WOMAN: We tried to believe that there would be a liberation someday. We tried and tried and convinced ourselves, and tried to convince the weaker ones that we were sure that the Americans or the British or the Red Army would come very soon to liberate us. But it was so long, you know. Every day for us was like a year. I think I would be right to say that we just lost hope. We tried to convince ourselves that we hoped, but we really didn’t. I couldn’t imagine when I could lie in a bed again—that I would have breakfast again, and lunch, and be a human being, and walk on the street and listen to music. And then, perhaps, lie in a hospital bed and die like a . . . like a normal human being.
I think they were simple people, German people, who believed that they are the Herrenrasse, the . . . the . . .
MAN’S VOICE: The master race.
WOMAN: The master race; they were . . . big people and we were just the . . . the
Untermenschen . . . [Fades out]
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: We feel we are guilty. We feel guilty because we have not the power to do what we want, or to prevent ourselves from doing what we don’t want, and we feel sad because of that. And then chiefly, because we have felt the Occupation, we have hated the Nazis when they tortured and oppressed us, and we were in the Resistance. We don’t understand: the people who have been in the Resistance now do exactly the same thing to the Algerians that the Germans did to us. That’s very difficult to understand . . . that’s not understandable, and anyhow, we don’t accept it.
[Singing “La Marseillaise”]
LILLIAN SMITH: The parts of our nature that are torn open; the wound that must not be healed: This, in a sense, is what I like to write about. But they would like to say, “This wound has been healed. Therefore we don’t have to even read anymore about it.” And this is very interesting about people, isn’t it? They want to be on the side of truth without ever facing truth. They want to be on the side of virtue without ever knowing what virtue is.
[The Weavers sing.]
Oh, sinner, what will you do
Oh, sinner, what will you do
Oh, sinner, what will you do
When the stars begin to fall?
[A brief recapitulation of the opening: the Japanese woman and the translator saying, “They were looking up in the sky, trying to spot the airplane”; the Japanese children’s song; the couple around the dinner table saying, “Heck, when I was nine or ten years old, I was wondering if the pond would have polliwogs in it this year”; once again the American children’s song, “Children of the Lord”; followed by Perry Miranda’s interview with the youth, and the phrase “You were born to die, that’s all”; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on banjo; and Terkel repeating Miranda’s question, “Born to die? What about between the time you are born and the time you die?”; and then:]
SEAN O’CASEY: That’s the question, “What is life,” my boy, “What is life?” Well, I found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometimes a terrifying experience. And I’ve enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other. And to me, life is simply an invitation to live.
The Irish playwright who defies the calendar, and is ever young . . .
O’CASEY: You know, God, or Nature if you like, dumps a little boy at the tick of a clock, maybe, or the dawn of a day, into life, and a tick after he dumps a little girl beside him. So the boy and girl meet very early. And God says to the little boy; and God says to the little girl: “Be brave. Be brave. And evermore be brave.”
SHANTA GANDHI: In one village, we had an experience which I’ll never, never forget in my life . . .
An Indian actress recalls a visit to a village during the Bengal famine.
GANDHI: It used to be our practice that after the show we would come out and just appeal for whatever people could give. We used to tell them, in very few words—sometimes through song, even—extra song; we’d appeal to give whatever they could for the people of Bengal. On one such occasion— in a very small village it was—after the show, when we came out in the auditorium, we found there was a tremendous commotion. An old woman—she must be about fifty-five or sixty, she was bent—and she was dragging a cow right into the auditorium! I couldn’t understand what was happening, and before I could recover from the surprise, she came up and said, “Take this.” I had no word to say! What could I say? I said, “Well, well, well,” and that’s about all I could! All the speech . . . everything was gone; forgotten. It was the old woman who said, “My child, I have nothing else to give, but take this cow. It still gives milk, you know. And as you say the children are starving, without milk. Please take this. I’m an old woman; I don’t need very much milk. And while I live villagers will see to it that I don’t quite starve. You take this cow with you.” And she insisted on giving the cow to us. What could we say? We didn’t want to deprive the old woman of the cow. More than that, it would have been very difficult indeed to take the cow to Bengal. Luckily we hit on some idea, and said to her, “Grandma, please look after the cow for us ’til we are able to make some arrangement to take this cow to Bengal. It is our cow, we know, but you are here. And who can look after the cow better than you?” And that alone persuaded the old woman to take the cow. That was the India of that time. And we wanted to depict that India.
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 . . .
. . . says an American poet, as he recalls a childhood experience.
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.
An eminent British philosopher poses the Great Question; and an American architect-designer recalls how that question came to be:
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. . . .
A Soviet playwright discusses the hero of his forthcoming drama.
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 . . .
A British writer of science fiction, in a moment of conjecture . . .
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.
Superior races, you said. You mean . . .
CLARKE: Well, I mean morally, intellectually, philosophically, technically . . .
No wars.
CLARKE: Well, a superior race cannot have war because war is a self-liquidating activity. . . . And I am optimistic about the outcome.
Either to destroy himself, or to be, perhaps, even more noble than ever, is that it?
CLARKE: Yes.
So the choice is ours.
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.
And it could be a blessing, too.
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? . . .
A distinguished American astronomer on the subject of man, the elements, and risk . . .
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.
