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220 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
to reproduce any of the material unless the Text-Book were included.
They complied with this stipulation. 3
June 25, 1942. That Interval of Time (on the twenty-year
cycle of war):
". . . History is a very dangerous subject. . . . Beware of
folks who lump different things, different kinds of things under
one label, such as a plow and a mortgage and call both of them
capital. Keep lands and hands separate in your mind, and remember
that all capital does not come from labour.
". . . And of course you ought not to be in this war, even to
cover up the grievous failure of the administration to govern the
United States, let alone fixing up the affairs of Europe and Asia."
July 6, 1942:
"There is so much that the United States does not know. This
war is born of such vast incomprehension, such tangled ignorance,
so many strains of undoing, that I'm held up in a rage by the
delaying needed to change a typing ribbon, so much is there that
ought to be put in young America's head.
". . . Art, economics, pathology [this is transcribed as 'Art,
economics, mythology' in the rebroadcast on July 7]—you need
to know more about all of them, need to get out of this war,
need to stay out and to prevent the next one, need to change the
stinking old system. Rotten art, artists, pathology, university delays.
How come class war? What is it the profs don't know? . . . No,
let us start on something that has been discussed in America for
20 years, 30 years. Doctor looks at literature. All this silly talk
about the diseased mind making a modern painting. It bored me
like hell. It was mostly poor stuff, but the fault lay in its limitations
and criticisms, not in the main what caused half-educated medicos
to go into it. What was wrong in the criticism was its lack of
proportion.
"Health is more interesting than disease: health is total. Beauty
is more interesting than distortion. We have most of us been
buffaloed, at any rate the intelligentsia is mostly an art not from
having no brain but simply from partialism in the original sense
of this word.