A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

LECTURE ON COMMITMENT

This lecture was written for the Beta Symposium at Wesleyan University, February 1961, while I was a Fellow at the University's Center for Advanced Studies. I was one of several members of the academic community all of whom, including President Victor Butterfield, were addressing the students on the same subject. I made my lecture on fifty-six cards, twenty-eight with texts, twenty-eight with numbers. (The numbers were numbers of seconds.) Directions for the use of the cards, followed to obtain the arrangement given below, were these: Shuffle the cards with texts. Ascertain the position of the one having the story about Goldfinger and Schoenberg. Shuffle all of the cards with numbers, reserving that having the number 120. Place that one in the numbers-deck in the position corresponding to that of the Goldfinger-Schoenberg story in the texts-deck. Using a stopwatch, read the texts in the corresponding time-lengths. This provides a twenty-minute talk. Other numbers cards could be made in order to provide a talk of another length. The typography is an attempt to provide changes for the eye similar to the changes varying tempi in oral delivery give to the ear. LECTURE ON COMMITMENT In order to fulfill all our commitments, we need more ears and eyes than we had originally. Besides, the old ones are wearing out. In what sense am I losing my ear for music? In every sense. 50 To do? Or is it already done for us? What did we do to be born? Did we, after con-zyx 112 sideration, choose life here rather than on another planet or in another solar system, feeling there were better opportunities on Earth? That we would get farther? 35 Say, through some bull-headed commitment, you get yourself into a bad situation. The wisest thing to do would be to get out of it as gracefully as possible (to order a retreat if you happened to be a general). 55 The question is not: How much are you going to get out of it? Nor is it: How much are you going to put into it? But rather: How immediately are you going to say Yes to no matter what unpredictability, even when what happens seems to have no relation to what one thought was one's commitment? 60 When I first went to Paris, I did so instead of returning to Pomona College for my Junior year. Looking around, it was Gothic architecture that impressed me most. And of that architecture I preferred the flamboyant style of the fifteenth century. In this style my interest was zy 113 attracted by balustrades. These I studied for six weeks in the Bibliotheque Mazarin, getting to the library when the doors were opened and not leaving until they were closed. Professor Pijoan, whom I had known at Pomona, arrived in Paris and asked me what I was doing. (We were standing in one of the railway stations there.) I told him. He gave me literally a swift kick in the pants and then said, "Go tomorrow to Goldfinger. I'll arrange for you to work with him. He's a modern architect." After a month of working with Goldfinger, measuring the dimensions of rooms which he was to modernize, answering the telephone, and drawing Greek columns, I overheard Goldfinger saying, "To be an architect, one must devote one's life solely to architecture." I then left him, for, as I explained, there were other things that interested me, music and painting for instance. Five years later, when Schoenberg asked me whether I would devote my life to music, I said, "Of course." After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I then explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall." 120 Seriously, shall we get with it? zyxwvu 30 Now we come to the subject of discontinuity in relation to commitment. Say I'm committed. Say somebody interrupts me while I'm working. If I let him (which is what I did when I was conceived), then I get...