The Notes (27 page)

S
uch things as truth, bravery, Loyalty, Honor, Love, kindness are the stars that hang always in the Heavens of all history—we never quite reach them, but as with the stars that used to guide a mariner to safe harbor, they are there for us to guide our conduct by.

“Wanted,” Sonnet by J. G. Holland

G
od give us men! A time like this demands strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and ready hands; men whom the lust of office does not kill! Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy; men who possess opinions & a will, men who have honor; men who will not lie; men who can stand before a demagogue & d—n his treacherous flatteries without winking; tall men, sun crowned, who live above the fog in public duty & in private thinking. For while the rabble with their thumb-worn creeds, their large professions, & their little deeds mingle in selfish strife, lo freedom weeps, wrong rules the land & waiting justice sleeps.

Anonymous

C
harity often consists of a generous impulse to give away something we don’t want.

Viktor Frankl, Austrian Writer

A
man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him or to an unfinished work will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the
why
for his existence and will be able to learn the
how
.

The Art of Living by Wilfred A. Peterson

H
appiness does not depend on what happens outside of you but on what happens inside of you; it is measured by the spirit in which you meet the problems of life. Happiness is a state of mind. Lincoln once said: “We are as happy as we make up our minds to be.” Happiness doesn’t come from doing what we like to do but from liking what we have to do. Happiness comes from putting our hearts in our work & doing it with joy & enthusiasm. Happiness grows out of harmonious relationship with others based on attitudes of good will, tolerance, understanding & love. The master secret of happiness is to meet the challenge of each new day with the serene faith that “all things work together for good them that love God.”

From “Force 20 from Navarone,” Alistair Maclean

W
hen all things are lost & there is no hope left, there is always somewhere in this world one man you can turn to. There may be
only
one man. More often than not, there is only one man. But that one man is always there. Or so they say.

Maxwell Anderson Speaking at Rutgers U., 1941

T
he purpose of the theatre is to find & hold up to our regard what is admirable in the human race. The theatrical profession may protest as much as it likes, the theologians may protest and the majority of those who see our plays would probably be amazed to hear it, but the theatre is a religious institution—devoted entirely to the exaltation of the spirit of man. It is an attempt to justify not the ways of God to man but the ways of man to himself. It is an attempt to prove that man has a dignity & and a destiny, that his life is worth living, that he is not purely animal & without purpose. There is no doubt in my mind that our theatre, instead of being as the evangelical ministers used to believe the gateway to h—l, is as much of a worship as the theatre of the Greeks and has exactly the same meaning in our lives The plays that please most and run longest in these sin-haunted alleys (of Broadway) are representative of human loyalty, courage, love that purges the soul, grief that ennobles The great plays of the world . . . teach one & all that an evil action revenges itself upon the doer. “Antigone” & “Hamlet” & 10,000 modern plays argue that injustice is corrosive & will eat the heart out of him who practices it. Analyze any play you please which has survived the test of continued favor & you will find a moral or a rule of social conduct or a rule of thumb which the race has considered valuable enough to learn & pass along. There have been critics who held that the theatre was central among the arts because it is a synthesis of all of them. Now I confess that the theatre appears to me to be the central art—but for a different reason. It does bring together all the arts of a number of them together in a communal religious service. Any other art practiced separately can be either moral or amoral, religious or pagan, affirmative or despairing. But when they come together in the theatre they must affirm, they cannot be detached, they cannot deny. It is as if poetry, music, narration, dancing and the mimetic arts were bits & pieces of theatrical art, stripped away to function alone and rudderless without the moral compulsion of the theatre.

A
nd now I must give a definition of what seems to me morally sound. If an artist believes that there is good & that there is evil, and in his work favors what seems to him good and expects the ultimate victory for it, then he is morally sound. If he does not believe in the existence of good & evil, or if believing in them, he asks or even anticipates the triumph of evil, he is morally unsound. To some artists the present good may seem evil & the present evil good. That has happened often in the case of a poet or prophet. A playwright cannot run so far ahead of his audience, for he must find a common denominator of his belief in his own generation & even the greatest, the loftiest, must say something which his age can understand. In brief I have found my religion in the theatre where I least expected to find it, & where few will credit that it exists. But it is there, & any man among you who tries to write plays will find himself serving it, if only because he can succeed in no other way. He will discover, if he works through his apprenticeship that the theatre is the central artistic symbol of the struggle of good & evil within men. Its teaching is that the struggle is eternal & unremitting, that the forces which tend to drag men down are always present, always ready to attack, that the forces which make for good cannot sleep through a night without danger.

M. Anderson Began The Above Lecture With These Words