GE FOUR
53 Years of Editorial Freedom
--
Published Feeste? throllth Elatt4 Collegian
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ED DUBBS, Editor
Asst. Bas Mgr.. Soo Mortonsoni Local Ad. Mgr. Marilyn
Managing Editor lady Harrison: City Editor. Hobert Prank- Elias: Asst.. Local Ad. Mgr.. Rose Ann Gonzales: National
lin: sports Editor. Vines Carseri: Copy Editor. Anne Fried- Ad. Mgr.. Joan Wallace; Promotion Mgr.. Marianne Maier:
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Editors, Matt Mathews and Lsa Prate; Make-up Editor. Ginny Bil!stein: Co-Circulation Mgrs. Pat &tientlekl and Richard
Philips: Photography Editor. George Harrison. Lippe: Research and Records Mgr.. Barbara Wall; Office
• Secretary. Marlene Marks.
STAFF. THIS ISSUE: Night Editor, Les Powell; Copy Editors, Dick Drayne, Pat O'Neill; Wire Editor,
Lynn Wald; Assistants, Edie Blumenthal, Marie Russo. Lolli Neuharth, Joan Bransdorf.
The Winner Names the Age
(Thr Doily Collegian /ast week printed an ex
cerpt from novelist Lillian Smith's hint! COlll
- speech at Atlantic University. Much
favorable comment was heard on the part we
printed. We agree with the Progressive Maga
zine, wh;ch first reprinted it in full, that is a
":supreli address." We have decided to reprint
it in full in several installments. The first
follows.)
Well, it is over now, isn't it? The easy part:
the research, the thesis, the long hours in the
library, the field work. In a sense, it was so
safe and secure, hard but pleasant, this learn
ing process; this easy, cloistered way of life
when one makes a friend or two, grows a bit in
mind and heart and imagination, and picks up
so many useful and useless facts.
All this you have done in the front rooms of
your mind.
But in the back room, somewhere inside you,
in a secret corner, you have been painting a
picture: a picture you began when you were a
child, long before you knew words. You have
not named that picture, as yet; perhaps you
never will; we usually don't. Although most of
us call it names—and I'm sure you, too, in your
nasty mouds, have plastered it wih insults. But
you have not decided yet what to name it.
For it is a picture of you: of your dreams
and feelings, your sudden visions, your aware
ness, your hopes and despairs, a picture of all
that this fabulous human experience has meant
to you up to now—or failed to mean.
What your style is, I don't know. That is your
secret. All I know is, that style is patterned on
you: on your unique way of looking at your
world. It may be gay and bold and strong in its
brushwork, compassionate in its feeling, or it
may be as full of terror and angry protest as
Picasso's Guernica. You may have painted an
abstraction; or it may be nonobjective;
. it may
be blobs and dots, dribbles and improvisations,
with, maybe, the bright colors, the startling
accidents of a Pollock; or you may be slowly
finding its form, and even now, it may be taking
on a little of the strength and equilibrium of—
shall we agree on Cezanne? Or if you dare not
look beneath the surface of lit?, or above it,
it is probably as literal as an amateur pho
tographer.
But *hatever it is, it is your picture of the
human experience and you have painted it. And
when you leave the campus, that picture will
go sith you, along with the facts and the
theories, the methods, and all the rest of it you
have learned here.
And you will keep on painting it. You may
lay aside one canvas and start another but
you'll keep at it. searching for a quality of truth
that eludes you. Searching for the underside of
meaning; searching for its poetry, its music, and
its 73ain. Or maybe you won't. As the years go
by. you may decide its colors are too harsh, its
lines too broken, too jagged, and you may do
that cruel thing: touch it up a little. You may
finally say, I cannot bear the truth. even the
small image of it I have made: I'll make it
softer, prettier— and less true. I'll paint as a
paper doll, or a marshmallow. A lot of us do
that, too, you know.
Whatever you do to it. that image of your
universe, of you and your experience of life, is
yours. I could not change it if I wanted to. And
I shall not try.
• What I want to show you is something else.
Not my picture of my experience of life: if you
want to see a smidge of that, you can read my
books. What I want us to look at together, now,
is a kind of rough, crude blueprint of this age
of ours: of the common ordeals—full of danger
and opportunities which we, regardless of pri
vate views or personal interests, must face to
gether.
It is an age that has no name. Nor will it
soon have one. It has often been called "the
Age of Anxiety." but it will not. I think, be
known in history as that For the winners
would not call it so: and the winners do the
naming.
Today OL'TING CLUB. 7 p.m.. HUB auditorium
ALPHA PHI OMEGA Rushing Smoker, 7:00 p.m.. HUB PF.RSHING RIFLES RUSHING SMOKER. 7 p.m.. Armory
dining room
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE ORGANIZATION. 7 p.m., 312 Chapel WR A
-SWIM CLUB members; 7:30 p.m., 3 White ,Hall
FROTH. Advertising Staff. 6 p.m.. office. HUB basement UNIVERSITY CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, tall• on 'Tat.
LANTERN Managing Board. 7 p.m., 216 HUB ing on Campus" by the Res. Earl Spencer. 6:30 p.m..
NEWS & VIEWS. Home Economics publication, staff and Waring Lounge. - •
. - taindidaleks SSD tp.m.. 4ii . Houss. Economics- Ir' ~ , • .TOUNG DEMOCRATIC' CLUB. 7- p.m... "218- HUB
THE DAILY COLLEGIA
,Mi x STEVE HIGGINS. Business Manager
Sometimes we forget this. We forget that al
ways an age is named for its triumphs, always
for the big ideas that add stature to the human
being. A brief glance at any great age, but let's
make it the Eighteenth Century, will remind us
how true this is. We call that century the Age
of Reason, of Enlightenment, of the Rights of
Man. And that is the way we think, today, of
those troubled, terrible times. For the ideas of
that century, the symbols that stirred the West
tern mind so deeply, the daring acts, were the
winners who named the baby.
And yet, actually, the Age of Enlightenment
was an age when most Western men could not
read or write. The Age of the Rights of Man was
a time when a new slavery was sending deep
roots into American soil, and a new colonialism
was beginning to lay its greedy paws on Asia
and Africa.
Let me remind you of a few other things that
were happening in this great Age of Reason.
It was a time when educated Europeans were
deeply concerned about ghosts. The Oxford
University magazines were full of discussions
of ghosts. Samuel Johnson took part, as you
might know he would have, in this controversy
—widespread in England. Witches, too, were
still a hot topic. This Age of Reason was an age
when the blind and crippled were persecuted
and half starved; when the mentally ill were
chained and some were whipped to death; when
the epileptics were hidden away; when men
looked on tuberculosis and cancer as punish
ments from God.
This great intellectual era that gave us Rous
seau's and Locke's writings, Voltaire's bold,
sharp, ironic questions, Thomas Paine's books,
and Jefferson's words of liberty and human
freedom, gave us also a curious best-seller which
swept Europe like wildfire. It was translated
into English. French, and German and was read
by the intelligensia.
Parents were deeply impressed by it and
sharpened their methods of child guidance on
it; clerymen preached on the morality it im
plied; doctors based their therapies on it and
continued to do so, some of them, until the
Twentieth Century . You may not, perhaps
have heard that book's name: It was called
L'Onanisme and was written by a physician
named Tissot. And it was concerned with the
secret sins that children commit. According to
this expert those sins caused most of the dis
eases known to man: from fits to diarrhea, from
insanity to blindess, deafness, muteness, cere
bral palsy, rheumatism, anemia, liver upsets,
and the like. .
This, all this, came out of the great Age of
Reason.
Even so, even though the Eighteenth Century
was chock-full of hysteria and superstition and
irrationality we are right to call it the Age of
Enlightenment. For the germinal ideas it
brought to life, the vision of man's possibilities
which is communicated to the future in im
passioned words and symbolic acts, will never
die. They are, today, a part of the human heri
tage. And will- remain as long as men live on
this earth.
There is always a dark underside to every age,
a festering ill-smelling slum where man's ene
mies and errors breed. But an age is remembered
not for its - enemies and errors but for those
qualities it dramatized which enlarge horizons
and give a fine ,ambience to man, himself.
Malraux was so right when he said. "Always,
however brutal an age may actually have been.
its stupe transmits its music only."
You and I can paint our picture but we can
not name our age; the winner will do that. What
we can do is pick the winner.
(In the next installment, Miss Smith takes a
look "at the conditions, the ordeals out of which
the winning ideas, the triumphant attitudes and
techniques will come. We are faced with three
which men never had to deal with before. Each
holds high potentials for good and evil, for life
and death.")
Gazette
N STATE COLLEGE PENNSYLVANIA
- -
Editorials represent the
viewpoints of the writers,
not necessarily the policy
of the paper, the student
tads• or the University
th• act of March 3, 1879
Little Man on Campus by Dick Dilater
"I have two books for my course. I get all my lectures from
th' best one ... th' lousy one is my required text."
Interpreting the News
Self-Apologies Fog
UN Peace Plans
By J. M. ROBERTS
Associated Press News Analyst
An atmosphere of apology has settled around the United
Nations before the General Assembly can even get started.
There has been explanation after explanation of why the
organization cannot make peace, cannot enforce its rulings,
yet remains a necessity if there is to be any approach to world
order.
Issues which have been on the agenda for years still
remain without disposition, and
without hope of disposition.
There's going to be a big debate
on disarmament, despite the five
months of conferences which end
ed in London recently with a
zero for achievement.
This debate will have no con
crete objective. It will merely
be an effort by each side• to pin
on the other the responsibility
for The zero. It will Increase
The despair of peoples every
where over the prospects of
settling the cold war or escap
ing the fear of hot war.
The United States will not make
many new friends, and may lose
some old ones in the debate over
admission of Red China to mem
bership.
The trouble of course is that
there is only a truce in the un
declared war over Korea, that
Red China still• imprisons Ameri
can nationals and carries the UN
tag as an aggressor, and that Na
tionalist China is still America's
baby.
Having condemned Russia and
her puppet regime in Hungary,
the Credentials Committee will
have before it the question of
the Hungarian delegation's right
to sit. Since Wan Waithayakon
will not report on his efforts to
ameliorate the condition of the
people of Hungary until the
session is far gone, the creden
tials matter is largely academic.
At any rate, to oust the Hun
garians while the Russian insti
gators of Hungary's troubles
sit tight would be ironic.
The long and moldy list of
other disputes before the UN, such,
as Kashmir and Algeria, will get
its usual attention and, again, be
put aside for future reference.
In this atmosphere, it is hardly,
surprising that the delegates were
Inclined to congratulate them
selves on being able to elect a
presiding officer without a dtig
fight. This happened when Leb
anon's eminent and popular DKR.
Malik withdrew for the sake of
unity.
Yet, in spite of all this stale
mate on concrete action, the
moral weight of the UN con
tinues to grow.
Britain Francs: Lela itch
THURSDAY. SEPTEMBER 19. 1957
zmder last year's UN interven
tion in the Suez matter, still
proclaim a loss of faith. But
their very submiision testified
to that moral weight.
The United States makes more
and more of its international ap
proaches through the UN.
An international police force
now is at least a possibility, as a
result of the UN Emergency
Force's success in the Middle
East.
If Russia continues to ignore
-3ublic opinion as expressed
through the great international
form, at least her character is
written upon its records for all
to see.
Indeed the UN's defenders do
have reason, even though the de
fense serves in one way to em
phasize its shortcomings.
TIM Council
Opens Positions
To Petitioners
Nomination petitions for 29
seats on the Town Independent
Men council are available today
at the Hetzel Union desk.
The petitions must be signed by
20 town independents. Members
of TIM council last semester auto
matically will be placed on the
ballot and incumbents will be
noted on the ballot.
The last day to obtain petitions
will be Sept. 30. Elections will be
held on Oct. 1, 2 and 3.
Applications are also available
at the HUB desk for town inde
pendent men. or groups wishing to
participate in football intramurals.
Groups interested in participat
ing in the independent division
of this year's Ugly Man contest
should also submit their name to
the HUB desk.
James Wambold, TIM president,
has asked former TIM council
men and others who have worked
for TIM in the past to leave their
new addresses an d telephone
numbers at the TIM office in the
HUB. They will then be contacted
_
for committee. work: