Guess what! I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a very old man. And lately I’ve been feeling my age.

I read that the Czech novelist, Franz Kafka, wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. Well, as I near that end, I’ve been looking back at the various periods of my life. The period of my grade school years, is one I wish I had the power of memory and of words to describe to you. It was a time you can’t imagine, it was so primitive compared with the world of the late 20th and the 21st centuries.

I entered the first grade in 1920. The school was in an ancient two-story brick building. The principal’s office was off a landing half way to the second floor. It was a terrifying place with a frightening smell of iodine, or linament, or something that signaled it was a place for scrapes and cuts, of stuff that burned, and bandages by that formidable old maid.

Read the rest of Fate and Finis at the HUU Community Cafe. The talk was given at the HUU Fellowship on December 7, 2008

Barack Obama covers the waterfront in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope — politics, race, faith, values, international relations, family, the struggles of the poor and the middle class in this country and around the world. A former professor of Constitutional law, he discusses the long history in the development and interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

You can read the rest of the review at the HUU Community Cafe.

There have, of course, been changes in the governor’s powers since 1942, so I have sought to bring the subject up to date, mainly by consulting a brand new book just published this year, entitled The Constitution of Virginia. The author is Dr. John J. Dinan of Wake Forest University. I also consulted with the reference department of the Library of Virginia.

Our Governor today is a very powerful executive. But it hasn’t always been that way. The first Governor under the constitution was the great patriot, Patrick Henry. The Virginia Convention elected him Governor on June 29, 1776, the same day it proclaimed the new constitution. He had virtually no power, nor did Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the other early governors. They were virtual figureheads, appointed by the General Assembly and by implication subservient to that body.

Patrick Henry protested the lack of gubernatorial power. A Governor, he said, “would be a mere phantom, unable to defend his office from usurpation of the legislature. . . and he would be a dependent instead of a coordinate branch of government.”

We were still at war with Great Britain, so Patrick Henry was given the direction of the militia, but that was about all. To take decisive action, he was required to seek the advice of a Council of State, also appointed by the legislature.

The framers of the Constitution were fearful of strong executives and tyrannical power. They’d had enough of that under the absolutism of the Colonial governors.

Since the Revolution, there have been seven constitutional conventions, in 1776, 1829-30, 1850-51, 1861, 1864, 1867-68, and in 1901-02, the last of the full conventions. There have been two limited conventions, in 1945 and 1956. I covered that latter one for the AP. And there have been two Constitutional revisions, in 1928 and 1971. Since 1971 there have been some piecemeal changes to the Constitution.

The second constitutional convention, in 1830, did only a little to strengthen the powers of the governor. The Council of State, now consisting of three members appointed by the General Assembly, was reduced to an advisory role. But the Governor was still appointed by the legislature.

Some delegates did seek to empower the governor by making the office elective by the people. Delegate Doddridge said : “What is the executive of Virginia? It is nothing more or less than an emanation of the legislative power. He is appointed every year and is responsible only to those to whom his is looking for reappointment. He is a creature of the legislature and not of the people.”
The Constitution of 1850 did made significant strides in empowering the Governor. It got rid of the Council of State, and the governor became elective by the people. His term was increased from three to four years. He was, however, still ineligible to succeed himself, as he is to this day.

The legislature appointed the first 41 governors. Since 1852, the people have elected forty-two governors.

It was not until1870, that the Constitution, for the first time, granted veto power to the Governor over bills passed by the legislature. It took a two-thirds vote of each house to override.

Thirty-two years later, under the so-called Underwood Constitution of 1902, the legislative powers of the Governor were further increased in that he was granted the power to veto certain items in the appropriation bills, the so-call “item veto.” He could also suggest amendments to bills. Then the Budget Act of 1918 authorized and required the Governor to prepare and submit to the General Assembly a biennial budget.

“Thus it will be seen,” wrote Dr. George W. Spicer of the University of Virginia, “that the development of a century and a half in the office of the Governor of Virginia carried him to a position of legislative leadership and administrative impotence.” Spicer pointed out that the Governor was unable to exert any effective control even over those officers appointed by him.

But that was about to change. Nine years later, in 1926, the Virginia electorate chose for Governor a young man with, as Newton put it, “a clear vision of procedure “ and “an unquestioned political leadership.”

In his campaign for Governor, Harry F. Byrd spoke only in general terms, like the need for greater economy and efficiency in government. The people were little prepared for the revolutionary changes that Byrd proposed to the General Assembly. That body was in thorough accord with those changes, and speedily passed the necessary legislation. “The young Governor,” Virginius Dabney writes in his Virginia, the New Dominion, “convinced them that his ‘program of progress’ was essential to their political survival. And that, according to Dabney, was because the Democratic organization was in danger of losing its hold on the state because of Virginia backwardness.

Byrd was responsible for the first revision commission, a commission to suggest amendments to the constitution. There was debate about the propriety of revising the constitution in that manner, but the proposal went forward and was upheld by future court decisions.

The Assembly adopted a joint resolution proposing the short ballot amendments to the Constitution under which only the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General could be elected by direct vote of the people. Before the short ballot, the state treasurer, the superintendent of public instruction, and the commissioner of agriculture and immigration, were elected by the people. Many Virginians opposed the short ballot proposal. They held that such a curtailment of elective officers was against the principles of democratic government.

Governor Byrd explained that under the current arrangement “the Governor cannot be as much of an executive as he should be. Public opinion holds him responsible for efficiency in administration, but actually he has very limited power to control and direct administrative functions. Therefore, he said, “if Virginia is to operate with the efficiency approaching a great business corporation, we must concentrate responsibility.”

The General Assembly also created a commission made up of eminent legal authorities. Under authority of that commission, the Governor employed the New York Bureau of Municipal Research to propose a plan of reorganization. A citizens committee then looked at the recommendations and revised them to fit the conditions in Virginia.

Governor Byrd called the General Assembly to special session March 10, 1927. By action of the legislature, more than 30 minor and useless administrative agencies were abolished, and the remaining agencies consolidated into 12 administrative departments and four agencies in the Governor’s office.

The legislature, by joint resolutions, set in motion the machinery for amendments to the Constitution that established the short ballot and greatly increased the Governor’s administrative authority. It adopted them again at the regular session in 1928. In a June, 1928, election, the people approved the amendments. But it’s interesting to note, that it squeaked by only because of majorities in the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest Virginia.

“Mr. Byrd,” Newman states, “was the first Governor of Virginia , almost wholly by reason of his unquestioned political leadership, who enjoyed the exercise of those administrative powers that properly should belong to the responsible head of a state. Administrative order had come out of chaos.”

Newman points out that at the time Byrd took office, ninety-five separate agencies were responsible for the administration of the affairs of Virginia. Twenty-seven of those were authorized by the Constitution, and 68 had been created by acts of the General Assembly. Financial matters were in the hands of 16 uncoordinated agencies.

Despite these improvements during the Byrd administration, some weaknesses remained.. “Departments,” Newman writes, “ lacked administrative heads with authority to consolidate them properly and channel their energies.” Over the years since then many of these short-comings have been corrected.

One of the Constitutional questions that has been debated time and again is whether Virginia should stay with the prohibition of a governor serving consecutive terms. Virginia is now the only state in the Union to retain the one-term limit. In recent years several governors have voiced their support for reconsidering the rule, including A. Linwood Holton Jr., Gerald Baliles, L Douglas Wilder, James S. Gilmore III, and Mark Warner. Warner’s Commission on Efficiency and Effectiveness supported a change. It said a “good case can be made that long-term planning and accountability would be enhanced” by “giving the public the right to decide whether it wishes to have the power to re-elect a Governor for consecutive terms.”

Non-consecutive terms are permitted. Mills E. Godwin was Governor as a Democrat from 1966 to 1970, and as a Republican from 1974 to 1978. Incidentally when Godwin ran the first time, I wrote several speeches for him, including his first campaign speech, which, by tradition, he delivered in Alexandria. He invited me to ride with him and Governor Albertis Harrison in the Governor’s big black, seven-passenger limousine. Well, even though I was still a state department head, that was quite a heady experience.

Over two centuries, until the Convention of 1971, the Governor’s powers vis-a-vis the legislature, have increased. In recent years, however, it has been a mixed bag, with the legislature gaining additional power to override the Governor’s veto, especially through the holding of reconvened sessions, as we saw this year.

But the Governor also saw his power increased with the creation in the early 1970s of the Governor’s cabinet, and with changes that gave the Governor sole power to remove heads of administrative or executive departments.

Over a span of some 230 years, the powers of the Governor have increased from being virtually a figurehead to the powerful executive he is today. The Governor remains very much the business manager of the affairs of the Commonwealth.

A talk delivered by James J. Geary
Before the Harrisonburg chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution,
October 14, 2006

This is quite a pleasure for me, talking about reporting with a group of young aspirant newspersons. The proportion of sexes is a little surprising. Don’t young men want to be newsmen any more?

Well, I was a newsman for 16 years, first on a newspaper and then with the Associated Press. I’ll try to interest you with some of my experiences and some of the lessons I learned.

First of all, I must to tell you, this is my half year birthday. I am 91 ½ years old today. So if I refer frequently to my notes, you will understand.

Secondly, I left reporting in 1958. That’s when your parents were little children. So today’s use by reporters of computers, cell phones, and recorders, and all the rest is all foreign to me.

I believe, though, that good reporting doesn’t change, no matter what aids you use. It involves accuracy, truth, and recognizing the difference between news and fluff. Years ago, I was told, that a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee would often end his lectures by saying: accuracy, dammit, accuracy.

I think I wanted to be a journalist even in my teens. When I was in high school I had to pull every string I could to take typing, because typing was reserved for commercial students planning to be stenographers or bookkeepers. But I got it.

I began my reporting career in November 1938. I think that was several months before Walter Cronkite began his. He went a bit farther in the news business than I did..

I went to work for the Roanoke World-News, the afternoon paper of the Times-World Corporation. The salary was $15 a week plus a bus pass. I was given a great beat for a cub reporter. It was a year in a little bureau the paper maintained in Salem, the county seat of Roanoke County. That was the reason for the bus pass. It was a small single office across the street from the Roanoke County Court House. That was convenient. I spent a lot of time in that court house.

First, though, I spent a couple of months in the Roanoke office learning the ropes. On my first assignment, the city editor sent me to cover a talk on the evils of alcohol. I had never taken a journalism class. But I had read that a good lead was comprised of the five Ws, who, what, when, where, and why. My lead to that story was something to behold. I still have the clipping. I’ll read it to you. – - – There are 62 words in that sentence. Unaccountably, the city editor ran it just as I wrote it, and he gave me a byline. I guess he wanted to encourage me. But there was another grave error in that paragraph. It has the paper saying the speaker was distinguished. That was a no-no for our managing editor. One time I used honorable before someone’s name. He almost had a fit.

Well, early in 1939 I was sent to Salem, and the reporter I was relieving spent a week breaking me in. Then I was on my own. I covered everything: three courts,, the country board of supervisors, the school board, the five county constitutional officers — the Commonwealth’s attorney, the clerk of court, the commissioner of revenue, the treasurer, the sheriff. Also the town council, the mayor, the residency and district highway department offices,, the chamber of commerce, Roanoke college, the Red Cross, Kiwanis Club speakers, anything and everything.

I had one great source. There was a controversy between the county school board and the board of supervisors. The chairman of the school board, Moss Plunkett, dominated the school board. He later ran for governor against the senior Senator Harry F. Byrd. Plunkett wanted to build a proposed highschool on an ideal location north of Salem. The town and the board of supervisors wanted to build it in town..

The Roanoke newspapers supported Plunkett editorially, so I could always get a story from him. He was a walking encyclopedia on school statistics. But, of course in the end,, the board of supervisors, which controlled the purse strings, got its way. – - – While in Salem, I think I helped my standing with the paper by writing some features for the Sunday Times. Although I worked for the afternoon paper, I was obligated to rewrite stories for the morning paper and to write something special for the Sunday Times. My mother, who had been a reporter and free-lance writer, encouraged me to make a special effort to write well-researched and interesting features. She thought it important that I demonstrate I was willing to do more than required.

I wrote a number of features and they were well played, with illustrations. My salary soon went up from $15 a week to $22 a week.

All in all, my year in Salem was a wonderful introduction to reporting, a splendid training ground for gaining a wide experience.

And then, soon after I was transferred back into the newsroom in Roanoke, I was given another break. The paper went from a salaried six-day 44-hour week to a five-day 40-hour week for reporters. Since we published six days, that meant that some reporter was off each day of the week. I was made the swing man, with a different beat each day, so that I once again covered almost everything. I think by the end of my second year, I was a very good reporter with an all-around experience. Of course you always keep learning.

Incidentally, while I was in Salem I learned a valuable but costly lesson. In re-writing for the morning paper a court story in which a woman had appealed a conviction for reckless driving, I wrote she was convicted on drunk driving. I knew better than that; I had written the original stories on the case. It was just carelessness. For the paper it was expensive carelessness. I never knew how much they paid to settle her suit for damages. I wasn’t fired, but I think it was a narrow escape. I’m sure Mr. Fitzgerald has emphasized that you should check, and double check.

I had been on the paper more than three and one-half years, when I received a commission in the Navy in the summer of 1942. After almost four years in the Navy I came back to the paper. By then I had a wife and two children, and I became very dissatisfied with the salary the paper was paying me, only four dollars a week more than when I went away..

I took a job in public relations with the Veterans Administration in Richmond. It turned out to be a great career move, but not with the VA. After I had been in the job less than a year, Congress slashed the money for VA public relations and I found myself facing the prospect of being laid off. But I wanted out of the VA, anyway.

So I went to a friend of mine from the Roanoke Times who was Governor Tuck’s press secretary to ask if he knew of any newspaper job openings. It just happened that he was resigning from the governor’s office, and the man taking his place was leaving the Associated Press Richmond Bureau. I applied for the AP position and got it.

I had only been on the job a few days when my new boss, Frank Fullerm sent me here to Harrisonburg to report on a terrible tragedy, an explosion that collapsed a building housing a beauty parlor. It was where aa bank is now, right across from Asbury Methodist church.. Eleven women were killed. That night I had a story under my byline that went to papers all over the country.

Actually, because I was new to how the AP worked, I messed up. Wire services then, as I suppose now, were very competitive and speed was important. I tried to cover the story as I would for a paper, going to the funeral home to get the names of the victims, checking out the site, checking with the police, and so forth. I should have stayed mainly at the Daily News-Record office and put together my story from the information being gathered by several local reporters. So I was late with my story. I always felt my boss should have given me better instructions. Well, you live and learn.

I soon became aware that most of the work in the Richmond Bureau of the AP was unexciting rewrites and editing of stories sent in by member newspapers and various stringers throughout the state. Our job was to tighten and improve the writing, if necessary, and send the stories on to the member newspapers and radio stations throughout Virginia.. If the stories were deemed important or newsworthy enough, we would forward them on the national or the regional wires.

The stress in the AP office was greater than that at a newspaper, because at a newspaper once the deadline is passed you can relax.We had no time to relax. You no sooner wrapped up the work for the a.m. cycle than you had to turn around and do it for the p.m. cycle. And we usually had more work than we could do.

For several years at the AP I worked all of those routine jobs, writing for the radio wire, taking news and sports stories over the telephone from stringers, working as day editor, and as night editor. Later, I was given a chance to write some features, and that was more interesting. And then in 1952 I was assigned to write profiles of the two candidates for governor, the Democrat Thomas Stanley, the choice of the Byrd Machine, and the Republican Ted Dalton, a charismatic State senator from Radford. Reporters were charmed by Dalton, and they had a dim view of Stanley.

I drove to Stanleytown, near Martinsville, and spent the day with Stanley and his gracious wife. The next day I spent with Dalton in Radford. I wrote separate stories for each, and the Virginia Press Association awarded me first prize for wire service stories. With the power of the Byrd machine behind him, Stanley won the governorship.

When the General Assembly was in session, four of us, including the bureau chief, would cover it. I was assigned the Senate, At the next session after my two profiles, I mentioned to Senator Dalton that I had won the award. After the assembly finished its work, he gave a steak dinner for members of the Capitol press corps and their wives in my honor.

The AP bureau had one real reporting job. We depended on the Richmond newspapers for local news, but our boss thought we should have a reporter on Capitol Hill. That meant covering the governor, the various state agencies, the State Supreme Court, and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s was a choice assignment, and I was given it about that time. Covering the governor’s office was the best part, along with politics, which went with the territory.

When the State Supreme Court had opinion day, I, along with the Times-Dispatch political reporter, would try to figure out what the sometimes lengthy opinions really said. There was no one to help you, no résumé. And of course you couldn’t spend all day.

When important segregation cases came to the Federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, the court was part of my beat. I used to see Thurgood Marshall, the prominent African-American lawyer who eventually became a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. But there was another African-American lawyer involved who, I thought, was the most brilliant lawyer in town, white or black.. He was a Richmond lawyer named Spotswood Robinson III. Eventually, he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

When in 1957, the National Governor’s Conference was held in Williamsburg. I was sent to cover it, along with Harry Nash, who was the one-man Norfolk bureau, and Jack Bell whose beat was the U.S. Senate. Jack Bell was our boss.

When President Eisenhower came to address the governors at a banquet in the Williamsburg cafeteria, Marvin Arrowsmith, the AP reporter who traveled with the president, joined our group. During Eisenhower’s speech, I was given a less than glamorous job. I had to hold on to one of the two telephones in the building for Arrowsmith in case Ike departed from his written text.

Bell took a liking to me and let me write the main national story the last night while he went to have dinner at the Williamsburg Inn with a daughter of Chief Justice Warren and a couple of other people. I joined them later. On a trip to Washington, I made an appointment with Jack and he took me down on the Senate floor before the session began while he interviewed Lyndon Johnson, then the majority leader in the Senate.

By 1958 I was getting restless. I was 44 years old and I felt I had gone as far as I was going to go with the AP. The boss had refused to okay my transfer to Washington, the Mecca for newspersons. And then opportunity struck.

The General Assembly had created the Virginia Civil War Commission, charged with a state observance of the five-year Civil War Centennial, beginning in 1961. That allowed for more than two years preparation. I was assigned to cover the organization meeting of the commission. I duly reported their actions and went on my way.

That afternoon, returning to my office, I bumped into State Senator Curry Carter from Staunton, who was a member of the commission. I stopped to chat with him and I observed that the commission had decided to hire an executive director. Off the top of my head, I said: “I don’t guess I’d be qualified for that job,” and he replied: “Well I don’t see why not.” Nothing more was said. I went on vacation for two weeks in Roanoke and forgot about it.

On returning to Richmond, I was hailed by a lawyer in the State government, who said the selection committee of the commission been looking for me. It turned out I was one of 12 applicants for the position of executive director. I got the job, and thus ended my newspaper career.

During my years with the AP I was associated with other newsmen covering the hill. Three who made it big time were Paul Duke, Roger Mudd, and James Kilpatrick. You may not be familiar with those names. Paul Duke was in the AP office with me. He went on to several national reporting jobs, and finally was moderator on the public radio program, Washington Week in Review for twenty years. Jack Kilpatrick went from political reporter for the Richmond News-Leader to editor of the paper, and then became a very conservative syndicated columnist. Roger Mudd at one time was supposed to share the NBC Nightly News anchor job with Tom Brokaw, but Tom beat him out. I think Roger still has an occasional feature on public television.

January 7, 1990

By James J. Geary

Wade asked me to talk, for not more than seven minutes, on my view of life after death. To do it justice I think I would need to go into my whole philosophy of being, and there is not time for that. But I’ll make a stab at it anyway.

I was given for Christmas this diary of H. L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore. I quote from the introduction by the editor:

“He had not a vestige of belief in an afterlife, but wrote, catalogued, and left behind him an enormous quantity of records so that those who came after him in this life would have an accurate picture of him.”

Now to me those records are Mencken’s afterlife, or rather a small part of it. Everything he wrote in life, everything he did, that had an influence on others, an influence on a fly or a rock, was part of his afterlife. That influence goes on and on, like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. It becomes a part of the universe, as of course was Mencken himself; and, of course, as are you and I.

Each of us is a part of the universe. (I don’t like that word “part.” Maybe “portion,” or “fragment,” or even “aspect” would be better.) Each of us is a portion or an aspect of the universe, just as is a mountain, or a sea, or, and this is a better comparison, a cloud. It is quite apparent to us that a cloud continually changes, from moment to moment, just as we do, just as a mountain does. Yet the cloud, and we, and the mountain, are portions of the Universe.

Our every act, our every thought, is a fragment, or an aspect, of the continuing and infinite experience of the universe. I think that is our afterlife.

A Zen master named Shunryu Suzuki, who moved from Japan to California, looked at the 1300-foot waterfall in Yosemite National Park. The water seemed to fall slowly because of the height, and it separated into a curtain of small streams and individual drops. He wrote, in part, as follows:

“And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling when it is one whole river. Only when separated into many drops can it begin to have or to express some feeling. . .

“Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. . . After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.”

I think that approaches how I feel about life, and about life after death. We were not individuals before we were born, although we were there, in a few billion ancestors. And I don’t think we will be individuals after we die. But we’ll be there, everything that we have been will be there as part of the continuing experience of the universe.

I think I have come to terms with death. I believe I have no fear of death.

Have you ever wondered what you would think about if you were at 30,000 feet in a plane that was hopelessly crippled and diving to certain destruction.

I have often thought that in a situation such as that I would face death calmly. I would be thankful that I had been a conscious part — for a little while — of this great, mysterious universe. I would feel that I as an individual would be no more, but that my life and everything that I had been or done would go on forever as a continuing influence in the universe, just as a dying star is forever a continuing influence in the universe. I would rejoin the great river — the great river that is the universe and which, of course, I have really never left.

Commentary

I made the mistake of trying to give this talk without notes. I would, I believe, have been much more effective if I had read it well and forcefully, I should have known this type of talk does not lend itself – at least for me – to delivery without the manuscript in front of me.

I don’t like the word “part” because I don’t believe in parts when speaking philosophically about being. I don’t believe, in an ultimate sense, that there are individuals. With Heraclitus I feel that the universe is all one, and in constant flux. Of course in our everyday existence we have to act as though the world is made up of individuals because we cannot but view ourselves as individuals- In the same manner, for practical purposes of the marketplace, or for putting a man on the moon, we need to employ mathematics. But mathematics, I believe, has failed to have any appreciaable influence in solving the mysteries of creation and being. It enables us to measure the speed of light and speculate on the distance to far-out galaxies, and even to theorize about a “big bang” and black holes, but in the end all the mysteries remain – what was there before the “big bang,” what is the answer to the many infinities, is there a beginning, is there an end. The reason mathematics has failed, I believe, is that it is an arbitrary tool devised by man to try to measure things; and in an ultimate philosophical sense the world is not measurable? it is not measurable because it is not made up of individuals.

Suzuki’s analogy, like most analogies, is imperfect. It is hard for us to equate a living thing, especially a human being, with an inanimate something like a drop of water. We don’t think of a drop of water as having feeling; although I think it can be argued that feeling is a matter of degree for everything that we view as an individual thing. What I was trying to say, I think, is that we should glory in being alive and having feeling and being conscious for however brief a time; that we should accept that this “gift” is not permanent; that we must always accept the bad with the good; that in the end everything is in balance.

And that brings up another equally important aspect of my philosophy that this paper does not touch on. As you know, I believe in an ultimate justice, a law of compensation, so that pain and pleasure, joy and sadness, hope and despair, are balanced for living things. Thus my sister, who died when she was two, not only missed out on the joys of growing up and of adulthood, but also the pains, the self-doubts, the despair.

This was in the fall of 1938, the year I graduated from the University of Virginia. It was a recession year, recession within the Great Depression, and jobs were very scarce. It had been a discouraging time for me. I spent some time during the summer with my Uncle Riner and his family in Buffalo hoping to find employment there. I visited my cousin Elizabeth and her husband Jack Beckert in Rochester, and was interviewed there by the personnel director for Eastman Kodak.

I returned to Roanoke to take a temporary job my Aunt Vedy had arranged for me in a plant manufacturing tomato cans. It was an assembly line job. I stood at the head of the line by a machine that rapidly picked up flat pieces of tin, one by one, and sent them along the line where they would be curved, sealed, and a bottom attached. My job was two-fold. I stacked the flat pieces of tin into an enclosure from which a great metal claw would snatch them up, two or three a second, and send them on their way. If the machine jammed, which it frequently did, I would strike a lever to stop the machine and then take huge pliers to pull out the crumpled pieces of tin. The faster I hit the lever, the fewer pieces got crumpled. The only satisfaction I got on the job was seeing how fast I could stop the machine once it jammed.

As far as I can recall, it was the only job I’ve ever had where I punched a time clock. It wasn’t very pleasant employment. Less pleasant was a job the management assigned me in order to keep me employed after they shut down that particular line. I was relegated to a damp earthen basement where I, a college graduate, was engaged in straightening out as much as possible the accumulation of crumpled pieces of tin. Then, tomato season over in Virginia, the operation moved to Florida for the winter. I was offered a job there, but I declined.

My friend Ed Sellers, a Washington and Lee journalism graduate, was working in the public relations office for the Norfolk & Western Railroad, and he knew of my interest in becoming a reporter. He advised me there were going to be a couple of openings at the Roanoke World-News because two reporters were leaving.

I promptly submitted an application to W. C. Stouffer, the nervous, irascible managing editor for the paper. He informed me he had a stack of applications a foot high, and that there were no openings that he knew of. I went back twice see him, the first time to take a short sketch entitled “Red Grange,” about a rooster. I had written it for my English composition class at the University of Virginia. He mailed it back, saying it was well-written. But the last time I went to see him he reiterated he had a stack of applications a foot high and that if I didn’t stop bothering him I would never get a job there.

Then in September I had a health problem. My lower wisdom teeth were impacted, and I had an old dentist in Salem remove one of them. I think he botched the job. My face on that side swelled up like a grapefruit, I ran a fever, and was in bed for a week. At the end of the week I took a long walk with my mother and that night the tooth hemorrhaged. I bled all night, and finally the dentist reluctantly agreed to see me about 5 a.m. after my mother told him I was bleeding to death. “A little blood at night looks like a whole lot,” he had told her. But he stopped the bleeding.

Now it was October and I had no job prospects; and I was rundown from my tooth experience. I accompanied my mother to Christiansburg, county seat of Montgomery county, on some business of hers there. More as a gesture than anything else, I went in to see the county superintendent of schools, C. C. Shelbourne. I feared there was virtually no prospect of a job opening for a teacher because it was already October. But an opening there was.

Shelbourne explained there was this remote school for which he had been unable to find a woman teacher willing to take the job. The school was two miles up a mountain road from the nearest decent place to find room and board. But he also explained to me that I was not at all qualified to teach; I hadn’t even had the hygiene course that every graduate in Virginia was supposed to have. How I graduated without it I don’t know. So, more discouragement; I got up to leave.

“Well, do you want this job or not?” he asked. I couldn’t believe it. Why yes I wanted it. So the necessary arrangements were made, including my staying with a farm family on Little River just a a mile or so upstream from the Pulaski county town of Snowville.

The Mr. Altizer, at whose home I stayed, was a part-time farmer who also did part-time carpentry work in Radford, so he had a higher standard of living than most of the people nearer the school. He and his wife were very pleasant, and they had a shy 13-year-old daughter. They lived in the kitchen during the week, and the cook stove was the only heat in the house. They did have a space heater in the living room, where there was overstuffed furniture; but I never saw it lit because that was only on weekends when I was home in Roanoke.

The cost per month for room and board was $15. For this I got breakfast, sausage and biscuits; a packed lunch of sausage and biscuits; and dinner, as I recall, also sausage and biscuits, but there must have been something else.

It was chilly October weather at that high altitude, and the sheets in my unheated bedroom were like ice. One night I had just gotten comfortably warm in bed when Altizer knocked on my door and said there was a possum in a tree across the creek that ran by the house, and would I like to shoot it. I reluctantly crawled out of my warm bed and dressed.

He handed me his daughter’s .22 caliber rifle and went with me across a footbridge to the tree. It was pitch dark. He shined his flashlight up to the top of the tree, probably some thirty feet. I could see two little beady eyes shining in the blackness, but nothing else. There was no way to line up the sights on the rifle.

I was no expert with guns, but I knew a little about them because I used to target practice with my Uncle Leslie’s heavy .22 that he had inherited from his brother Louin. I swung the rifle around to the sky which was light enough for me to see the sights. I lined them up, then slowly brought the rifle back to where I estimated the eyes were, and fired. The possum came tumbling down. I had hit it dead between the eyes.

My first duty, after I got settled, tested my courage because threatening dogs send a shiver down the back of my neck. I had to walk up the dirt mountain road to the school, stopping at each house along the way to tell the family that school was about to begin. Virtually every house had one or more big hounds that let me know they were suspicious of strangers. But I screwed up my courage and went in. Some of the men appeared indifferent or hostile; they didn’t care for schooling. But the women wanted their children in school.

I would go to the school early in order to build a fire in the little pot-bellied stove to take some of the chill off the room. It was a beautiful time of year, with the woods still in autumn color; and I enjoyed the two-mile walk. The road went by pastures, lots of woods, and a few mountain houses. On the first day of school most of the children came on their own. But I remember one little six-year-old boy who was brought by his daddy. He was very shy and frightened. His father tried gently to reassure him. He cried when his father left. When I left the school three weeks later he cried again.

I recall very little of my teaching, and I have no idea whether it was effective. I do know that I rarely sat down at my desk all day. I was too busy taking care of the several grades. Of the 18 pupils enrolled, only 15 came to school. Of those, six were only five years old, under age, but their families had entered them anyway.

The problem of these five-year-olds I solved by buying six little snubbed-nosed scissors and gathering up a stack of old magazines on my first weekend trip home. I had these under-age kids cut out paper dolls all day. To teach even the six-year-old pupils to read was a problem because they had seen so little of the world outside of their mountain homes. First grade reading books had pictures of taxis, elephants, street cars, and other subjects that these children had never seen and knew nothing about.

The children taught me a recess game called, I believe, anti-over. We divided into two sides, one on each side of the school building. One side threw a rubber ball over the school and whoever caught it rushed around and tried to hit someone with it on the side that had thrown the ball. If successful, then his side got to receive the ball again. We played this game at least three times during the day.

One day the supervisor, a little middle-aged lady named Miss Penny, drove up unexpectedly. I was glad we were not out playing anti-over. She said for me to dismiss the children, she wanted to take me to observe one of her teachers. We drove to a two-room school and I sat in the back of one room where a teacher was handling three or four grades. I was flabbergasted; I realized that this woman knew what she was doing and that I did not.

Children in one grade were busy doing posters or some kind of drawing. Others were busy with math problems or reading or what I don’t know. But they were all busy and interested. This teacher must have sat up half the night preparing for her day. I had a lot to learn — and to think about if I was considering education as a career.

But my health was improving. The daily walks to and from the school in the sunny, often crisp, autumn days , and the long nights of sleep were making me strong and vigorous again.

It was a hectic time, but I doubt if there is any other three-week period in my life from which I took so many memories. One-room schools were fast disappearing. I was privileged to have had a brief experience in one of them.

Then it ended as abruptly as it began. I received a two-line letter from Stouffer saying there was an opening in the news department of the World-News, and if I were interested to come see him. I went and he gave me the job. Mr. Shelbourne let me out of my contract, and in addition said if it didn’t work out for me he would rehire me. I departed, happily and sadly, to begin my twenty-year career as a journalist.

Good morning again, survivors! And congratulations!

We are all survivors, are we not?

(Story – not sure what was read)

So he didn’t survive. But we have — at least so far. Survival and security is the topic of this talk ; but it is also about ancestors, and children, and the celebration of life.

First I would like for us to take a look at some remarkable aspects of survival. Not only have we survived, but our parents had to survive, at least until we came along, or we wouldn’t be here would we.

And our grandparents were survivors, and their parents and grand-parents — at least to the reproductive age.

So I guess we are made of the right stuff; and they were made of the right stuff. And then, too, just maybe they were pretty darn lucky. Luck is a big thing in this world.

But you know what , it was not just our immediate ancestors who have survived to the reproductive age. It’s our ancestors for the past…thousand years? million years? no, it’s our ancestors for the past billion years or so!

And there has not been a single break in that almost endless chain — or rather I should say in those almost endless chains, because for each of us there have been thousands, millions of ancestral chains — not a single break in any one of them for a thousand million years, and more.

If just one of the vast number of ancestral lines that each of us has, had a break, we would not be who we are. We’d be somebody else.

I don’t know about you, but that just boggles my mind — to coin a phrase. I have a hard time taking that in: not a single break for billions of generations, even back to our ancestors who were little wiggly things in the sea; and even before that.

So, for us and for our billions of ancestors, it has been a pretty benign world — a pretty benign world.

But is it a benign world?

Let us consider for a minute the number of living things that have perished before reaching the reproductive age. Think of the hundreds, maybe thousands of seeds that die for each one that takes root; or the many that take root but are crowded out before they can reproduce seeds of their own. Consider the great number of fish eggs that are gobbled up, or the baby fish that are eaten for every fish that reaches adulthood.

Or to bring it closer home, think of the agonizing number of children that our more recent ancestors lost. My maternal great grandparents lost three our of ten. My paternal grandmother lost six out of eleven.

So it appears to be a very dangerous world, and we who have survived must indeed be made of the right stuff; and we and our ancestors must have been unbelievably lucky to have come so far.

Very interesting. But what is my point?

Well, it seems to me, that in view of that long record of survival, we are sort of obligated to do the best we can to continue to survive. And we are sort of obligated to teach our children how best to survive.

It’s interesting to speculate about our remote ancestors, or about what humans will be like down the road. But it doesn’t really mean anything. It is the here and now that matters, our lives and our children’s lives.

And survival seems to be the name of the game. It appears to be nature’s intent that a few of us, with the right stuff and a bit of luck, shall survive. But we have to work at it. And that is where security comes in.

To be secure, or relatively secure, requires constant vigilance. I watch a lot of nature films on T-V, and vigilance appears to be second nature to all wild animals.

Have you ever watched how alert and suspicious a deer is — even the tame deer of Shenandoah National Park. In the game preserve in Idaho where Pat and I camped throughout August, the deer would come up and eat out of your hand. But they never let their guard down; they always remained a bit suspicious.

That’s how they have come down without a single break in their billion years of descent. Everything in the animal kingdom — with the possible exception of humans — appears to be ever vigilant, always looking to their security.

For us, there are many kinds of security. There are endless kinds of physical security: bolted doors , locked windows, special electronic security systems, neighborhood watches, police protection, courts of law. Some people have guns, Mace, attack dogs, you name it. On a larger scale we have very expensive armies and navies to protect us from invasion and possible death or slavery.

Armies and navies are also designed to protect the economic well-being of their citizens — in our case, to protect the flow of foreign oil that gives us such a grand standard of living, our so-called American way of life. Because we, and people the world over, are also very much concerned with financial and economic security. We work hard at it, trying to make more money, to save more money, to protect what we save. In some countries the peasants, distrustful of their governments, cultivate gardens to assure themselves of enough food should the distribution systems break down for some reason. Other people hoard gold as the one true thing they expect to hold its value.

Life is a sort of tight rope that we have to continually walk, isn’t it. We could fall off at any time. And it is so easy to let our guard down, to believe that we, at least, live in a benign world. Yet disaster can strike so unexpectedly. Ask the parents of the kids that perished in the recent Halloween dance in Sweden; or the survivors of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and Nicaragua.

Thirty years ago Ted, my handsome young son-in-law, a Navy lieutenant, Naval Academy graduate, went boar hunting with a friend in the wild, rugged mountains of California, just east of the Big Sur country. In the pre-dawn darkness they lost the trail. They separated in an effort to find it. Just then a freak storm, rain, wind, fog and snow moved in from the Pacific. You have to see the chaparral that covers those mountains to realize what a dense impenetrable thicket of shrubs and dwarf trees it is, even without fog and rain. Ted never made it back. It took Army and Navy search teams, including helicopters, nine days to find his body.

His friend did find his way back. He was lucky. They weren’t prepared, had no compass, or map, or adequate clothing, and apparently hadn’t checked the weather report.

Disaster can strike so unexpectedly.

There is, of course, no absolute security. Professional robbers can always break into our homes. Police are not adequate for complete protection. Drunk drivers may crash into us. On the economic side, our whole financial structure might collapse, as it almost did in 1929, and as it has done in some countries, like Germany after World War I. Life savings can be wiped out by illness, loss
of a job, or bad investments. ABC had a feature recently on how little most of us know about finance and investing, and how little our children know about saving.

We in this country are unbelievably prosperous. But so is much of the world. I’m not sure the human race can stand prosperity — the kind of prosperity that has enabled us to dominate nature, to a degree, and to multiply all out of reason. Sometimes I think civilization is like some flowers. They take a long time to mature, then flower briefly and die. I wonder if we, here at the end of
the 20th century, are in the flower stage.

In the past there have been devastating scourges that wreaked terrible tolls on human populations: the Black Death, the Thirty Years War in Europe, our American Civil War, the flu epidemic of 1918, World War II, to name a few. I am confident there will be other firestorms. Nature is not going to tolerate endless, runaway population growth, or an accelerating rape of the world’s resources, without exacting a price.

I realize, some of these dire scenarios seem pretty remote for us. But many of them are within the realm of possibility in the decades ahead. Let me suggest one that is not so remote. Your child, or your grandchild, or you nephew or niece, could be killed or badly crippled tonight, or next Saturday night, or on prom night, either as the driver or the passenger in a recklessly speeding car that crashes.

So what to do about security, ours and our children’s? And, since we are UUs, what is spiritual about all of this?

To me, there are two steps we can take that are superior to any others in securing our future survival and that of the children we love. I believe they will stand us in good stead no matter what the future may bring.

First, we can guard our health, physical and mental, because being strong and alert is our first line of defense. If we abuse our health, or don’t have a positive outlook on life, we are letting down our guard.

Second, we can educate ourselves in those things that will best protect us in case of calamity.. I’m not just talking about the education we get in schools — although that is very important — but also the practical knowledge about handling the everyday problems and hazards of living — a sort of street-wise wisdom, if you will, much of which we learn by word of mouth.

If we have those, health and knowledge — and character is implicit in both — then we are equipped to better face whatever the future may bring. And if we teach our children to cultivate good health, physical and mental, and a good well-rounded education, then they too will be better equipped to face adversity.

A little philosophy would be helpful to us also, and to them, should everything else fail. We must learn not to take ourselves too seriously. Die we all must, and if it comes sooner than later, it is better that we be philosophical about it.

As to the spiritual in all of this. I think I have already answered that: we are sort of obligated — by nature, or God, or providence — to do what we can to survive and to teach our children how best to survive. It seems it is what is expected of us. And that calls, not just for personal vigilance, but also to work for a more peaceful world.

People reflect and argue about the purpose of life. Some think the purpose of life is to worship God, so they can be saved and in the afterlife they can have eternal peace and joy. Others, in the Orient, think the purpose is to build good Karma in successive reincarnations so eventually they can attain nirvana and have eternal peace and bliss. That’s all fine, if you feel one of those is the purpose of life and it gives you peace.

I have a different view. I’ve lived a long time, and I have never found any purpose in life other than the living of it: facing the day; meeting life’s challenges; reveling in the beauty of a sunset or of child’s face; participating in the great adventures of life, the adventures of marriage and parenthood, of inquiry, and travel, of new people and old friends. In short, to take part in and enjoy the great cavalcade, the great, mysterious and magnificent pageantry of existence.

Why isn’t that enough? Why should we ask for more?

It seems to me that If nature has any purpose for us — other than just living — it must be to produce the next generation, so that generation can produce the next one, and on and on, ad infinitum. So possibly our purpose in life is, first, to survive, and secondly, to produce children and to train them to survive — that is, if we can have children and want children. If we can’t have children, or don’t want to have children, then maybe life’s purpose for us is to
help others survive and help them protect and teach their children to survive. So in the end, maybe life’s purpose is just for us, first, to survive, and then to be good parents, or good uncles or aunts, or maybe just good Samaritans.

[As I turned on the music, I said "April Fool." It was What a Beautiful World by Louis Armstrong  When it finished, I remarked that it was not April Fool after all; that the quot;Satchmo" really did give us a spiritual song. I then went right into my talk]

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world! And I think, what a world of beauty! This talk, or sermon if you please, is about beauty. Its about how beauty gives me — and I hope you — what for want of a better term, I shall call spiritual uplift. It’s also about the wonderful world we live in.

Some forty years ago I came across a brief supplication — a sort of supplication to oneself. It has remained with me all these years, and I often repeat it to myself. It goes like this: Stay with me, beauty, as the fire grows cold. Now, I don’t know what that meant, exactly, to its author. But I know what it means to me. I believe I draw strength in life principally from two aspects of love, my love for my family, especially for my wife, Pat; and my love for the beauty, and the wonder, of our world.

And so, when I say stay with me beauty, It means as I grow older, as my faculties fade, that I will continue to be supported by my love for the beauty of the universe, for my love of beauty in all its manifestations. And they are many.

But what is beauty?

Each of us, I imagine, has his or her own view. I doubt if any two are alike. Perhaps many of us have not thought about what we mean by beauty. Some things are just beautiful; that’s all. For some beauty is bright colors, of a sunset or a painting. For others it may be a religious image. For some it is a pleasing melody, or the architectural splendor of a great symphony, or the architecture of a building, the Taj Mahal, for instance. And, of course, beauty has for each of us many different forms.

We all employ the words beauty or beautiful in a multiplicity of ways. It can be the character of a great, good person — we say: she has a beautiful character. Or we speak of a beautiful gesture, or beautiful deed. Probably most of us say "what a beautiful woman," or "what a beautiful child." Some uses of the word are casual indeed — a beautiful car, the long drive of a golf ball off the tee, a broken field run by a football player.

For many, the night skies are beautiful and peaceful. Jeri Nielsen, the woman doctor rescued from Antarctica for a breast cancer operation, wrote in her book Icebound, of the "ecstatic wheel of stars" in that icy wilderness. We can be moved by such a vista, can be moved by a beautiful speech, a beautiful poem. A poem can make us feel more alive, more in tune, more appreciative of nature.

Whose woods these are, I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow

Robert Frost’s poem does that. We can feel the silence, can see the dark woods filling up with snow, and have a brief feeling of peace.

So, again, what is beauty?

Writers, philosophers, poets, religious leaders, have struggled with interpretations or definitions of beauty for thousands of years. The ancient philosophers discussed it at length.

Plato believed that there were perfect transcendental forms — in heaven, so to speak — for all things, and that everything in our sensible world, including abstract concepts such as beauty, were pale copies of those perfect forms.

Panaetius insisted that beauty of a visible object lies in the arrangement of its parts, and that this required a higher level of perception than animals have. Plotinus, the Neoplatinist, believed things possessing beauty were not only things seen or heard, but also "beauty in the conduct of life, in action, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect."

Early Christians had to admit there was such a thing as beauty, especially in the human body; and they wrestled with whether it was from Satan or was something they could embrace. Well, that preeminent Christian philosopher, Saint Thomas Aquinas, did embrace it. He said beauty consists in due proportion; because, he said, "the senses delight in things duly proportioned." He also said the beautiful is the same as the good.

Surprisingly, the great modern philosopher Emanuel Kant, so concerned with metaphysical and ethical inquiry, also found time to work out his own theory of aesthetics. I studied it one time as part of a philosophy course — pretty tough sledding. Essentially, he held that the judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment; that the satisfaction in the beautiful is "alone a disinterested and free satisfaction."

These, of course, are gross oversimplifications of what these thinkers had to say. The subject is vast. I checked out of the library a 400-page book on aesthetics. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy has 20 pages devoted to the subject.

Literature is filled with thousands of uses of the word beauty and many interpretations. I came across a little book of selected verse by Goethe, with English translations. I opened it near the middle. One line on that casually-selected page read: "Remembrance of what is beautiful is the salvation of mortal men." I don’t know what he thought was the salvation of women.

I recently read something rather poignant: Christa McAuliffe’s mother, as she waited for her school-teacher daughter to take off in the Challenger, described the view of the shuttle, steaming and awesome in its cradle in the gantry, as "beautiful." I used the same term as I watched another shuttle lift off in a fiery nightmare and climb through the dawn sky, trailing its long smokey plume, pink from the rising sun, as the shuttle became ever smaller on its outward journey to space.

I believe a shuttle launch is beautiful because it represents such a triumph of human imagination, ingenuity, and courage. And we are human, so it gives us a feeling of expansiveness. — a feeling of expansiveness

And that brings me to my definition of beauty, which is a broad one.

To me beauty is that which does give one that happy feeling of expansiveness: of being more alive; of being a living, breathing part of this vast universe. It is that which gives us a feeling of satisfaction that we can appreciate the richness of the world, that we are imaginative and sensitive and sensuous. Beauty is richness, abundance, magnificence. It makes us feel rich, abundant, magnificent. I believe that in a subconscious way, we become newly aware that we are human beings, we are homo sapiens. We have those great brains and fine sensibilities that enable us to cherish the world and our place in it, to judge perfection or at least an approach to perfection. We realize anew that we are humankind — we can appreciate beauty. These are not thoughts that we put into words, of course. They may not even be thoughts; they are more a satisfactory feeling, a warm glow, a feeling of peace. We look at a lovely sunset; the sensuous beauty of a handsome galloping horse; or the thick fur, the nice lines, and the intense eyes of a mountain lion, and we experience beauty. We don’t tell ourselves we have a feeling of expansiveness; or that we are superior, or rich, or magnificent. We just, for a moment, feel good.

We don’t all find beauty in the same way, of course. Some seem to find beauty only in nature, and they can’t imagine your finding beauty in a city scene. Well, I surrender first place to no one in my love of the wild places. The beauty of the natural world is one of my chief pleasures and I have many hundreds of photographs I have made to attest that — the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, the picturesque vistas of Carmel Bay, or the wild juxtaposition of mountain and rocky shore of the Big Sur country. Yet I have seen cityscapes that are among the most lasting impressions of beauty in my memory.

I remember well an early one of those city scenes. I was 19 and an friend and I had hitchhiked from Roanoke to the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933. The fair had been built on reclaimed land jutting out into Lake Michigan. So they had piled large rocks at the waters edge to keep the shore from washing into the lake. One evening we went out to those rocks to eat our brown bag dinner. The fair hugged the shore, which curved around in a great arc as we looked to the west. It was after sundown and the sky glowed with color. And there on our left, along that great arc, were the magnificent, gaudy neon lights of the fair, yellow, green, blue, red, every color of the rainbow, contrasting with the more subdued colors of the sunset. I was ecstatic.

I recall a somewhat similar scene, years later, during World War II. I had taken a trainload of newly indoctrinated sailors from Idaho to San Francisco. They were bound for the receiving station at Treasure Island, which, as you may know, is just west of the San Francisco-Bay Bridge. The train came in to Oakland, so the Navy provided a couple of whaleboats to deliver the men across the bay to their destination. It was my first trip to San Francisco, but I had heard many things about that fabled city. My anticipation ran high. As we left the dock and headed west, it was a little after sundown, the same as in Chicago. As we proceeded through the bay, the western sky was pink, and blue, and turquoise. And there on the hills on my left the lights were coming on in San Francisco. What an introduction to that great city. I was enthralled.

And then one night in New York I emerged from a night club on the East side. I guess I had had one or two, or three, And there before me was a scene I shall never forget. It appeared there were a million lights, in front of me, above me, and as far as I could see to the right and to the left , for it seemed that all the windows in all the skyscrapers in New York were lit up  — like an immense jewel.

Views of these vibrant cities gave me that feeling of expansiveness..

Then there is another kind of beauty. I said my definition was broad. It even covers the feeling I get from reading a well-written piece on the great pageantry of human history, of evolution, of massive migrations, of Alexander the Great, or the power of the great world religions. It covers the effects of great scientific advances, like Newton’s laws, or the Hubble telescope. These readings, if they move me, I call beautiful. They also give me that feeling of expansiveness, make me feel more a part of the dramatic human march through
history.

But, in the final analysis, I believe that what I am mainly thinking about when I ask that beauty stay with me, are those simple beauties of the natural world, a colorful sunset, the stars on a clear night, the rise of a golden full moon; or snowy clouds against a dark blue sky, a winding stream in a meadow, or a bird on the wing. . Those are the types of beauty that sweep over me with a warm feeling of peace.

There is a southwest facing window in our bedroom. Whenever I see evidence of a colorful sunset I rush up to that window, or out to our second-story deck, to watch it. I can see much the same vista as I drive up to our garage. Often I pause there, especially if it is sunset, or if low clouds are curling up the mountain sides, and I sit for a moment to take in the view and feel its magic. Or I will go out on our second-story deck in the late evening just to look down on the lights of Harrisonburg and the dark mountains and pale sky beyond.

This love for natural beauty, I believe, is love for the world, for the universe, for life. Is there ugliness in the world. Of course there is. That’s the other side of the coin. But this is about beauty. Cancer is one of the ugliest things. If I get cancer, or some other bad thing, I hope I won’t let it ruin what’s left of my life. I hope I won’t let it blot out beauty. And as time passes, and the years go by, and I consider the calendar, that old supplication that I read many years ago, means more than ever to me. Stay with me beauty, as the fire grows cold.

When Beryl Lawson called me at the end of January and asked if I would put on a program March 22, and I agreed, she then asked me for a title, I was about to leave on an extended trip out-of-state, so off the top of my head I said "The Philosophy of a Lifetime." I leave to you if it is an appropriate title.

I suppose it is rather trite to say these are troublous times we are living in. I think we all realize there is widespread doubt about the traditionally accepted verities. Many of us -feel we are in a time of political, moral, intellectual – and I might even say – spiritual crisis. In addition to the historic problems that have beset complex civilizations, our society has to deal with many new and difficult ethical questions – ethical questions that the rapidly accelerating world of science has tossed at our doors. To say the least, we are confused.

There have been other times like this in history. The period around the beginning of the Christian era was such a time. There was confusion then about the meaning of life at a time when there was much poverty and much cruelty. As a result, there arose a great profusion of cults and soothsayers. One of these, with a message of hope for those times, became more successful than the rest.

Earlier, in the ancient Greek world, there was such a time when both the old mythological religion and the newer cosmological speculations were found wanting. These uncertainties gave rise to the Sophists with their rejection of all such ontological and cosmological cogitations. Forget trying to understand being and the meaning of life, they said look to the practical side of life, live for this life.

Today there is a widespread searching for not only a meaning to life, and an understanding of death, but also for some substrate, some standards, for a viable system of ethics to deal with our modern world. There is uncertainty, insecurity, even fear, of what the future holds, we are worried about ecology, the population explosion, the remoteness and instability of governments, and the terrible potential that the human race can eliminate itself from the planet. we feel helpless? we don’t know where to turn.

Once again the anthropomorphic religions are losing their credence. Yet our scientists and philosophers seem no nearer to arriving at an ultimate understanding of being, of ultimate truth, of the meaning – if any – of life, than the Greeks were in the Per id can period.

The organization of our little UU group is, I believe, evidence of our bewilderment. Many of you are searching – searching for something, perhaps you know not what.

Tonight I will try to bring you a message of hope.

Although I’m not sure hope is the right word. It is not hope for salvation in an afterlife, not hope for another existence in this world, or in another world, or in another dimension. Rather it is a philosophy of living – living in this world.

Wen I am through some of you may say that I am following in the footsteps of the Sophists, that mine is an inward looking, selfish philosophy bereft of any spirituality. Some may say it is sophistry, or even that it is sophomoric.

But I believe it is a philosophy which has the potential to make your life calmer, to give you more of a feeling of security, to lessen fear, to give you more courage to face the future, whatever it brings. It is a philosophy that has stood me in good stead since 1 was a teenager. Yes, since I was a teenager.

I remember, when I was just 19 years old, striding across some fields and voicing out loud to myself "I bring you a new religion; I bring you a new religion."

Well, that messianic feeling, that philosophical imperative, if you will, has never really left me. But, on the other hand, it has never produced a full, coherent, published message. My views have been formulated in my own mind, and I have discussed them with individuals, but you are the first group to whom I have unveiled these thoughts. And I would not characterize these views as a religion, but more – as I said ~ as a philosophy of living. Religion implies a numinous feeling, belief in a spiritual world, perhaps even faith in a personal god. Some of you may be looking for that. But that is not my message.

Since that day nearly sixty years ago when I strode across the fields in deep thought, I have done a lot of soul searching. I have studied many of our western philosophers and some of our Christian thinkers. I have studied Oriental religions – Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism. And while I have refined some of my thinking, the basic tenets of my belief have not changed since those long ago days.

I can’t hope in this brief time to impart to you a complete understanding of what I am proposing. But perhaps it will be enough to spark, the curiosity of some of you and we can discuss it further at another time.

This philosophy of mine is supported by three legs, three beliefs; first, that we live in a determinist world; second, antithetically, that we have free wills; and thirdly – and this is probably the most original and radical thought – that human emotions are balanced; that there is a natural law of compensation in human affairs. This third leg means that there is a balance of pleasure and pain in each of us; that there is, after all, a final justice for human beings (and, for that matter, for all living things), not in a next world, not in an afterlife, but in this world, in this life. Let me discuss the three pillars of my philosophy one at a time;

First, determinism, what is it? It is a belief in cause and effect; that every effect has a cause; that all the actions of our lives, up to this moment, were inevitable. Let me explain.

If you believe, as I do, that when a great symphony orchestra performs – let us say Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony -it was all in the cards, so to speak, a long time ago, eons ago, billions of years ago. If you believe every note, every finger movement of every musician, every batting of every eye in the orchestra and in the audience, was ! inevitable as far back in time as you want to go, then you are a determinist – not a soft determinist, but a hard determinist, as I am.

I doubt if many of you are. And I won’t try to adduce arguments in favor of that view tonight. It is not my main message. Let me just say that I have believed it with all my heart since high school days.

But now you ask, what about that second leg, a free will. If I am a determinist, how can I believe in a free will. If my every move, my every thought was in the works before I was born, where is the decision making, where is the free will. That is a contradiction, you says those are two diametrically opposed ideas, you say.

And I reply yes they are. I totally agree. But human thought is replete with contradictions. I expect there are contradictions in every religion, and in every philosophy. Let us take the idea of space. Can you imagine an end to space. To our finite minds, there would always have to be more space on the other side of the end. Yet we cannot imagine there not being an end to space. So we have a contradiction, we can’t really grasp the concept of infinity. The same thing holds true with time. we can neither imagine an end of time nor time without end. If you can, then you can grasp infinity.

So to be a determinist and yet to believe in a free will is indeed an inconsistency, a contradiction, a paradox. So be it. I will try to explain.

I have assigned a name to my belief that all things are determined, and yet that we each has a free will. I call it Dynamic Dualism. And Dynamic Dualism says we live in two worlds, a conceptual world and an everyday practical world. In the conceptual world we, or least I, can imagine a materialistic universe in which everything has a previous cause, a world of cause and effect; a determinist world. So as I have said, I am a convinced determinist. I believe my every action and every thought was in the works from – well, let us say – from the beginning of time, if there was a beginning of time.

But determinism is an intellectual concept only. It is a conversation piece in philosophical discussions. It is not something you and I can live by. we don’t live in a conceptual world, we live in an everyday world, a practical world of choices, we have to make choices, we cannot avoid it. we make hundreds of choices every day. I have to act. I have to believe that I have a free will. I choose to get up in the morning. I choose to go to bed at night. I choose to eat. I make lists. I plan. I see my plans come to fruition – well, at least part of the time. I study. I write. I seek. I choose to raise my arm, to clench my fist. I demonstrate before you my free wi11.

It impossible for anyone, even the most dedicated fatalist, to do nothing, to make no choices. One cannot sit around and wait for things to happen, we have to make them happen.

So, one may say – as I say – every action of my life up to this moment has been determined by my inheritance and the environmental forces impinging on me. Yet, as we face the future, the next moment, the next hour, the next day, we have to use our wills – our free wills, we have to believe we have free wills, we cannot make a choice without assuming that we have a choice.

So we live in two worlds, a conceptual world, the world of the past; and a subjective, practical, everyday world, the world of the present/future. As I look back on my life, up to this moment, I don’t see how I could ever have made any choices other than the ones I did make. But, as I look to the future, I know that I am the captain of my soul; I have a free will. I can make choices. I have to make choices. There is no other way I can live. I have to believe I have a free will.

It is that contradiction that I call Dynamic Dualism.

But what about the third, the most important pillar of my philosophy, the idea that there is a balance to human emotions. This third leg is not dependent on a belief in the first two. It can stand on its own.

I don’t take credit for this view. I absorbed it from an uncle, who in turn was influenced by Ralph waldo Emerson’s essay, "Compensation," from which you heard some quotations tonight. For some reason Emerson doesn’t seem to have followed up on it; so I will be his apologist.

This last is the most difficult of the three pillars of my philosophy to explain. But I will try. It is difficult because most arguments, most examples, are strictly subjective.

First of all, what do I mean by a balance to human emotions, a natural law of compensation. This view, like the first one, determinism, is rather materialistic, because it is like the law of physics that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. By compensation I mean that pleasure is balanced by pain, and pain is balanced by pleasure; that happiness is balanced by nhappiness and unhappiness is balanced by happiness; that hope is balanced by fear and fear is balanced by hope.

Now let me ask you, if such were the case, would that not be justice for every individual; whether she lived 100 years, as my mother did; or two years, as my sister did. would not that be final justice in a world that appears completely unjust,

You may ask of me "How can you say that a poor man or woman, a deprived child, has the same balance of pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, hope and fear, that a rich man or woman has, or a privileged child. And I will answer you that I cannot possibly quantify these emotions, even for myself. Nevertheless, that is exactly what I believe.

I take it on faith, on the basis of observation, on my own experience. I believe it because I don’t see how it could be any other way. You can’t make something out of nothing. Happiness cannot come from nothing. Pain cannot come from nothing. The one creates the other.

Let me explain, if I can, what I mean by pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. I don’t mean that if you are ecstatic in the morning you will necessarily be deeply depressed in the afternoon. I don’t say that highs will always be balanced by equal lows, or vice versa. Sometimes highs and lows are so minimal that we don’t recognize them as such.

I regard boredom, ennui, as pain. It is a low grade of pain, but pain nevertheless. A long period of boredom, or mild difficulty, or annoying frustration, might be balanced by a short period of soaring good feeling – such as a mountain climber might feel on reaching the top after a long and arduous struggle up the mountain. Such a rush of good feeling is happiness. For the mountain climber it balances out the low grade pain of the long climb.

Likewise I regard a mild good feeling, the pleasure of a good book, or a soft breeze on your cheek, as happiness. Happiness doesn’t have to be soaring; it can be low key, mild, hardly noticeable as happiness. But if it goes on for some time it amounts to quite a bit of pleasure, of good feeling. And it can be balanced by a sharp rush of pain or unhappiness.

Hopeful anticipation is a pleasure; it is happiness. Disappointment is pain; it is unhappiness. One might say; "I could see the pain in his face." You could say that of someone who has lost an athletic contest, or a spelling bee. He or she is in pain; they are unhappy. And the more confident the pleasurable anticipation of winning, the greater the pain on losing. It is a question of balance; of compensation.

The pain and uncertainty of a long recuperation is balanced by the hope of recovery, the pleasure of progress, the anticipation of being wel1.

Are any of us so naive as to think the rich are happier than the rest of us. Of course we know they are not. We know in our hearts that behind the walls of their great houses there are many kinds of pain, many disappointments, many frustrations, self doubt, personal loss, fear, despair. They pay for their leisure, their comfort, their fine possessions, as Emerson says, in silence and certainty.

All right, so what is hopeful, what is helpful in this philosophy of mine. What in this view leads to calmness, a feeding of security, a lessening of fear?

I believe this faith, if you truly embrace it, will smooth out the peaks and valleys of your emotions. Your highs may not be as high but your lows will be more bearable. Your moments of joy may be compromised somewhat by the knowledge that you will pay for them. But your depressions will not be as deep, because you will know that sooner or later the reaction will set in, the balance will be achieved.

You simply learn that everything has its price – that in human emotions, just as in the practical everyday world of human intercourse, there is no free lunch.

You learn that the pursuit of happiness, a search for a sort of permanent good feeling that can be built up, like money in the bank, is a chase after a wi11-o-the-wisp. There is no such thing. The bank account is fluid. It is constantly fluctuating between good feeling and bad feeling, between surplus and deficit.

Life is an adventure. It is interesting, but it exacts its price. You cannot create something out of nothing. Emotions are relative. Pain and pleasure are opposite sides of the same coin. You can’t have the one without the other. You have to learn to accept the price.

So there you have its Dynamic Dualism and compensation; determinism and yet a free will. And a balance, in each of our lives, of pleasure and pain. Final Justice.

I don’t know if there is much there to satisfy any spiritual quest that you may have. But to me there is a positive spiritual concept in the thought that there is justice in nature.

And there is one other things Some will say there is no basis in these views for right behavior, for a system of ethics that society can live by.

I deny that. I believe there is a firmer foundation in these views for personal ethical behavior and for a socially acceptable system of ethics than there is in didactic moralizing from some ancient written word.

But the arguments in its favor are subtle, and there is not time to go into them tonight. Perhaps some other time. For now, let me just say that I have given you my philosophy, one that I have found satisfying for all these many years. It is my philosophy of living; a philosophy of a lifetime.