The Best Use of Long Years

June 7, 1959
Akron University
Baccalaureate Service


In speaking to you of the best use of long years, I am aware that the suggestions offered involve simplicity of living rather than easy answers to the labyrinthine complexity of the problems in the world in which you live. This is not because there is a lack of sufficient awareness of the critical issues, but is rather a cherished hope that you will recognize that there is cause for happy profound living under any conditions.

Consequently, I will not dwell on the immensity of the issues of our world, other than to attempt a brief analogy.

In the ancient scripture of Samuel, the epic encounter of David and Goliath have always served as one of the great “hero” stories. There are two great adversaries today who may be represented by Goliath and David.

Who is Goliath? In a world bristling with weapons terrible enough to have made a Ghengis Khan blanch with horror, we face the continuing threat of war. In a world where under-developed and hungry nations are conscious that perhaps starvation need no longer be the norm and crippling disease the expectation, heedlessly we behave as though all the world were as fat and comfortable as we. In a world where we refuse to face up to the facts of the population explosion, the staggering daily net increase in the number of people in the world, (120,000 each day, 5000 every hour!) even the most ingenious discoveries of agronomist and chemist may prove insufficient to avert a calamitously excessive density of population. In a nation which professes religious virtues and democratic ideals, the somber appraisal of many social studies reveals us to be most strongly motivated by acquisitive, status-seeking goals.

If these hazards, liabilities and other perils unmentioned were considered as one Gestalt – this would be Goliath! Do not underestimate the strength of these giant forces.

Who is David? David is man as a moral, spiritual being. This view of man assumes that because the Judeo-Christian heritage is a source of human society based no justice and mercy, with the individual presumed to be of supreme worth, the ideals of freedom, rationality, and political democracy can be proposed and accomplishment realized gradually. David is the symbol of the totality of the brotherhood of man, the universality of God and the practice of compassionate living.

We too can re-assert David’s passionate question, “is there not a cause?”

But, whether we know Goliath’s vulnerable spot, or whether we have David’s singlemindedness of purpose and accuracy of aim is as yet unanswerable. For as the political economist, James F. Warburg points out (THE WEST IN CRISIS, p. 17) “The fatal weaknesses of Western Man have been his insatiable acquisitiveness and his inability to live at peace with himself. Both are products of a materialism insufficiently restrained by humanitarianism and moral sensibility .... In his endless quarrels, Western Man has reached forever more deadly weapons of murder and destruction.”

Sometimes I think we fit the biting appraisal of Dr. Skinner in Samuel Butlers, WAY OF ALL FLESH (p. 115). “He had the harmlessness of the serpent and the wisdom of the dove.”

With no reflection on the commendable process of group definition of problems and goals, I would submit to you that the modern duel between Israelite and Philistine is the struggle for the mind of man. Furthermore, unless we as individuals prize and cultivate our individual minds, then any social process will degrade our ideals. Unless we are unrelenting in standing forthrightly for individual freedom and human dignity, then the words of Hector (TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, ACT II, SC. 2) would fit us with deadly precision, “’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the God.”

Therefore, I presume to offer advice to individuals. For what avail is social process if too many of us echo the poet’s anguished cry, “where is the life we have lost in the living?” It is said that in a churchyard in Scotland, this rather puzzling epitaph appears on a tombstone,

“Here lies the remains of Thomas Nichols

Who died in Philadelphia, March 1753.

Had he lived, he would have been buried here.”

Is that not a mournful clause for anyone’s obituary, “had he lived?” I suggest to you that in order to endure the pressures upon us in the world where the target is our minds, we need not only defenses against Goliath, but also safeguards against our own over-organization. [Editor’s note: handwritten in margin: “faceless men in the crowd”]

Many years ago a high-school teacher in the Bronx, N.Y. gave parting advice to a graduating class. His advice was simple, but since the time one of his students passed it on to me, I have discovered that profound meanings are involved:

Take a walk

Read a book

Make a friend

Wheels, wings, and time-clock living have conspired to make walking a lost art. Charles Dickens once said, “the sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy; walk and be healthy; -- the best way to lengthen out our days is to walk steadily and with purpose.”

A walk in the cool of the evening or the brightness of the day establishes contact with a reality we tend to neglect. The great poets remind us in Wordsworth’s words that it is better to be a “pagan, nurtured in a creed outworn,” than to become so engrossed in the mechanics of existence that we neglect our vital, organic relationship to the universe in which we “live and move and have our being.”

Goethe proposed that “nature is the living, visible garment of God.”

Shakespeare, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” (Troilus and Cressida).

Bryant rhapsodized,

“to him who in the love of nature holds

Communion with her visible forms,

She speaks a various language.”

Even skeptical Voltaire once remarked, “Men argue, Nature acts.”

But the value of a walk is not alone for the purpose of communing with Nature. Some persons respond not at all to the loveliness of a flower or the majesty of a wooded hill. “A primrose by the river’s brim

A yellow primrose was to him

And nothing more.”

For the sake of inner honesty a person needs the opportunity to escape the jingle and jangle, mingle and mangle long enough to organize his thoughts. Victor Hugo reminded us, (LES MISERABLES, p. 519), “Meditation is, as well as prayer, a necessity of humanity.”

We need the discipline of being able to live with ourselves. We may not spend the time that Thoreau did at Walden, but like he, we too should now and again listen for the beat of a distant drum. In our own day Peter Viereck has wisely observed (THE NEW AMERICAN RIGHT, p. 114-5), “there comes a time when lasting values are conserved not by matey back-slapping but by wayward walks in the drizzle....”

Then, too, sudden delights are the occasional rewards bestowed when walking on a country road, the city street, or a primitive trail. Helen Keller, whose life is glory, once said “Oh the unexpected joys that meet us just around the corners of life.”

Take a walk.

Read a book. In this season when the pressures of exams, term papers, and reading reports are released, you may look with jaundiced eye on this exhortation. “Read a book. That’s all I’ve been doing for years!” you may say. You might quote with some secret satisfaction that old New England proverb, “Reading rots the brain.” Perhaps a weary student coined that one. Or you might approve Milton’s comment about the one who was “deep-versed in books, but shallow in himself.”

But while these graduating days may be the occasion when you keep up only with Dick Tracy and the stumbling Indians (who seem to be vanishing in the American League), your years will be well-used if you read—the classic, the novelty, the poetic, the bizarre, the “who-dun-it,” the stern criticisms of our follies and foibles and the great prophet minds who call us to become masters over our waywardness.

The O.T. prophet, Habakkuk (2/2) said long ages ago, “Write the vision; make it plain upon the tablets, so he way run who reads it.” Not much has been written clearly enough so that we may read on the run, although it is said of John Wesley, founder of the great Methodist church that he read history, poetry and philosophy while riding his horse on his long years of itinerant preaching. Most books need some single-minded attention. Your life is placed on a long line of social history. If you want perspective, you must go to the books. It is the books which transform the campfire legend to authentic history. If you would know history, you must go to the books.

Furthermore, although we all enjoy escapist reading from time to time, the art of reading is a serious as well as enjoyable pursuit. G.K. Chesterton once observed, (Charles Dickens, THE LAST OF THE GREAT MEN, p. 73), “There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”

So I plead with you in Goethe’s words, “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”

Read a book

Make a friend.

If your college years have given you at least minimum blessings, you have made and cemented friendships which will endure all the years of your life. One of the best uses of the long years will be the maintenance, renewal and deepening of those friendships. Socrates spoke wisely when he said, it is well worth while to learn how the win the heart of a man the right way.”

Let me hasten to add that the years will batter you about and some friendships may provoke bitter disillusionment. Ambrose Bierce, one of the most thorough-going of cynics, spoke bitterly when he coined this saying for The Devil’s Dictionary: “While your friend holds you affectionately by both hands you are safe, for you can watch bot his.” Another embittered definition goes like this, “A friend is one who dislikes the same people you dislike.”

In spite of the possibility that the deepest hurts will happen when a friend “does you in,” make a friend. In the fellowship of human beings resides the relationship of deepest meaning and greatest job. If you only take walks and read books you are a solitary exile who has lost perspective.

Dostoevsky writes of this in the BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, when the following appeared in Father Zossima’s diary:

“All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof and hides what he has from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them....”

David’s friendship with Jonathan was far more significant to each of their lives than the spectacular victory over the Philistine giant.

The need for friendship will present difficulties for you peculiar to our age. This is an age of mobility. 25,000 people in the United States move every day. Many of you will shift your homes and occupations to other states, other countries. Today’s child is born in Canton, educated at the University of Akron, marries in Youngstown, moves to Cleveland to Dallas to Phoenix to Detroit to Cape Canaveral.

The opportunities no longer exist for most of [us] to derive the continuing joy of friendship from childhood associations through the adult years. In each of your moves I hope you keep before you the wise words of Hebrew scriptures (“A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such a one hath found a treasure.” So be a friend to have friends, whereever you go.

You may be wondering what this advice has to do with the titanic struggle for the minds of men between the Goliath forces and the David forces. Simply this – in order to be fit for the terrible struggle you must face, there must be moral resources so that you will have convictions disciplined by orderly thought and systematic knowledge. This strength you will need in order to take a political stand, influence political decisions and exert decent, democratic pressure on political institutions. [editor's note: the wording of the next sentence is unclear in the original] It is in the simple profundities of life that there is glow when the motivations which lead people change the world.

The best use of long years is to recognize, in John Ruskin’s words (UNTO THIS LAST) “there is no wealth but life.” In Miss Sackville-West's biography of Joan of Arc (p. 90), Jean de Metz offered to help Joan and asked her when she wanted him to start. Joan answered, “Now, rather than tomorrow, and tomorrow rather than the day after.”

Take a walk –- read a book – make a friend.