Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

collision with my obligation to say that I am happy. And at once an air of unrealityenters the auditorium. It is not a chill; it is not a skepticism; but it is a disappointment.Convention demands that I say it, but the moment I have said it, it is spoiled.These young men and women are near enough to their childhood to remembertheir agony when, on leaving a party, they knew that they had to say to theirhostess: “I had a very good time.” A certain number of children always manage tosay: “My mother told me to tell you I had a very good time.”Here we are plunged into the heart of a basic American characteristic.If you have to do a thing, you have lost your freedom. If you have to saya thing, you have lost your sincerity. If you have to love your parent, wife, child,or cousin, you begin to be estranged from them already. If you have to go into theArmy … if you have to study Shakespeare …Life, life, life is full of things one has to do; and if you have a passion forspontaneity, how do you convert What You Have To Do into The Things You ChooseTo Do?That is one of the most exciting things about being an American and aboutwatching American life: how an American will succeed in converting Necessityinto Volition. It is a very beautiful thing, and it is new, and it is closely related toour problem of authority.I hurried over this formal salutation as best I could. There lay several monthsahead during which I could show in other ways that I was happy to be among them.Most Americans solve this problem without the slightest difficulty by a resort tohumor. Much American humor is precisely the resolution of the conflict betweenobligation and spontaneity. But we cannot all call upon that happy national giftwhen most we need it.In January 1874, Charles Eliot Norton wrote to his friend JohnRuskin, “I want to be made a professor in the University here,” andfive months later he was writing to Thomas Carlyle that one of hisaims would be to quicken—so far as may be—in the youth of a landbarren of visible memorials of former times the sense of connectionwith the past and of gratitude for the efforts and labors of formergenerations.I then went on to announce that the subject for my lectures was “TheAmerican Characteristics of Classical American Literature” and that this firstlecture dealt with the American Language, and that I did not mean the use of newwords and idioms, nor did I mean slang or incorrectness. I meant the result of anomnipresent subtle pressure which writers and speakers in the United States wereexerting on the mother tongue—within the bounds of syntactical correctness—in187