Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

does he confront them outside the classroom. Many an apparently stupid student ismerely a student who has been browbeaten, has been stupefied, by being overwhelmedwith too much of the unarguable, unanswerable, unexaminable. The intellectual lifehas been presented to him as a realm in which man is not free.In the Old World, a lecture tended to be a discourse in which an Authoritydispensed a fragment of the truth. Naturally I am not talking of informativelectures—”Recent Theories on the Origin of the Nebulae,” “Silversmiths in 18th-Century New England”—which are inherently reading matter, and are so delivered:but of lectures in fields where every listener can be assumed to have formed or tobe forming his own opinion. When Queen Victoria, accustomed to the discretionof Melbourne and Disraeli, complained that Gladstone addressed her as thoughshe were a public meeting; when in impatience we hear ourselves saying, “Pleasedon’t lecture to me!” what is meant is: “Kindly remember that I am a free agent.Everything you say must be passed upon by the only authority I recognize—myown judgment.” An American lecture is a discourse in which a man declares whatis true for him. This does not mean that Americans are skeptical. Every Americanhas a large predisposition to believe that there is a truth for him and that he is in theprocess of laying hold of it. He is building his own house of thought, and he rejoicesin seeing that someone else is also abuilding. Such houses can never be alike—begunin infancy and constructed with the diversity which is the diversity of every humanlife.So I must remember to maintain the tone of a personal disposition. I maymake as many generalizations as I wish, and as emphatically; but I must not slipinto that other tone (how easy when one is tired; how tempting when one is insecure)of one in privileged relation to those august abstractions—tradition and authority.Mr. Archibald MacLeish: Ladies and gentlemen: The Committeecharged with the selection of … .My good friend, our admired poet, is introducing me. During the introductionof a lecturer in America everyone suppresses a smile: the introducer, theaudience, the lecturer.This introduction is a form, a convention; it is very Old World. To Americans,conventions are amusing. They have attended many lectures; they have heardmany a clarification and many an ineptitude. They have suffered often. Yet on everyoccasion they have heard the obligatory words: “…we have the pleasure of …it is aparticular privilege to have with us this evening …”Americans more and more find conventions amusing. It is amusing (andit is beginning to make us uncomfortable) that all letters must begin with the word185