Between Sick and Dying
We spent some time in May going to various talks, lectures, happenings, and even a full-blown symposium. One lesson learned is that the more things are "structured," the less they grip our attention. Anyway, our reporters' report:
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who came to the United States from Poland in 1935 and who writes stories in Yiddish, came to talk to an audience that almost filled Hopkins Center Theater. Rabbi Laurence Edwards, an associate chaplain at the College, introduced him by saying, "My grandmother loves Isaac Singer and I love Isaac Singer - and that says a lot about Isaac Singer."
Singer said he began to write before he knew the alphabet and that his father told him. "You can spatter ink, Isaac, but it won't write a letter by itself." He used to make up improbable stories to tell his friends and once, when he told them his father was a king, they believed them. He read Edgar Allan Poe's stories, all in Yiddish, and Shakespeare's plays - "enlarged and improved by David Horowitz."
Singer, who calls himself a mystic, explained that as a boy growing up in wartime Poland "neither human reason nor God's mercy seemed real.... My childish hope was to discover truth, and through its discovery make sense of my own life." The truth he came to see, he says, is that God's essence is creativity. "The world is God's novel, and Satan is his critic."
He read a new children's story about a foolish girl and the bigger fool her parents, with the help of a matchmaker, found for her to marry. Asked why he liked writing for children, Singer said, "Children don't read reviews." When someone asked why he chose to write in a "dead" language like Yiddish, he replied, "I am ready to admit that Yiddish is a sick language, but in Jewish history between being sick and dying is a long way." He agreed to read something in Yiddish, which a lot of the audience seemed to understand, and said, "I speak Polish with an accent. I speak all languages with an accent. There is even an opinion I speak Yiddish with an accent."
The man was short, slightly bent over, his broad forehead punctuated by flaring eyebrows and crowned with white glory. His voice, crisply magnificent, tolled with the imperial tones of the British upper class. He was Malcom Muggeridge, commentator and former editor of Punch, who, while Isaac Singer was calming nerves in a nearby hall, pronounced sentence on Western Civilization in a talk called "The True Crisis of Our Time."
The "liberal mind," he said, has a "death wish" along with its "optimistic view of human progress." According to Muggeridge, our "doctrine of progress makes our social existence deleterious and ludicrous," an existence in which we have a "super-abundance of erotica." In Western societies, "Sex is the mysticism of materialism. . . . We worship the Great God Consumption" and seek "heaven on earth in our increasing Gross National Product."
The British curmudgeon said that society is too concerned with material riches and not enough with its spiritual inadequacies. Looking at the ways of the Communist world, Muggeridge said that the "whole stupendous effort in blood and tears to condition men to a wholly terrestrial existence has been a total fiasco."
What did this lay prophet say we should do? "Rejoice," he advised, "that it has been revealed once more that God never abandons ... the truth will make itself heard."
The North Woods were full of other interesting people coming and going in the merry month, as divergent in style and substance as Betty Friedan and former Senator James Buckley.
Joan Baez and flocks of woodspeople had closed out April with a fine flourish. Baez's highly successful concert was preceded by a curious debate in the pages of The Dartmouth as to whether she was a timeless folksinger or a passé symbol irrelevant to the contemporary college student. The Green sprouted telephone poles for Woodsmen's Weekend's choppers and sawyers, and events such as the packboard relay and distance flycasting were contested at Storrs Pond. With 25 teams competing, the Dartmouth men took second to the University of Maine and the women to Colby College.
The main event of the first week was the Senior Symposium on Equality - one of those troublesomely billed as "first annual." Friedan, founder and first president of the National Organization for Women, pinchhit as keynoter for Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, who was detained in Washington on legislative business, and she later appeared on a panel discussing "Women and Equality." Other sessions had to do with equality as related to American Indians, global corporations, development in an interdependent world, class, Afro-Americans, gays, and education. Midway through the symposium, there arose a confrontation between Friedan and Ernest van den Haag, a conservative on matters of sexuality. Explaining that she didn't "have to take this," Friedan got up and went home.
The equality symposium came to town hard on the heels of a science fiction symposium sponsored by the Student Forum and the River Cluster and overlapped the annual Class Officers Weekend, which brought 450 officers and their spouses to talk about how they do their jobs and to honor those deemed to have done them most worthily.
No sooner had all these people departed when Buckley arrived to warn us that "we have so overloaded the federal horse with responsibilities that used to be exercised by state and local governments that we are now approaching the point where our constitutional agencies are breaking down." "No one who loves sausages or the law," he said, "should see either being made." So Green Key came along and with it those familiar happenings such as Hums, Spring Sing, and Chariot Races - and others less "structured," a very big word these days. It's a debatable point, but it seems to us that the highlight of the whole affair - and possibly the month - was the Pow Wow (fifth annual) the Native American Program put on at Storrs Pond. There were 34 dance contestants from 14 tribes, and they were spectacular.
Ray Field was the best "Fancy Dancer" at the Dartmouth Pow Wow this year and last.
