Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (20 page)

An Open Letter to Students

Dwight D. Eisenhower

October 1948

A
s president
of Columbia University I receive many letters from young people. Mostly they ask a question that could be put like this: Shall I keep on with school, or shall I plunge right off into “life?”

I try to answer each according to the circumstances. But if I could write a general answer, I think I would say:

Dear Jack—or Margaret: You say you wonder if it is worthwhile for you to go on with school. You particularly wonder if it is worthwhile to enter and finish college. The tedium of study, nose buried in books, seems a waste of time compared with a job and the stimulus of productive work. This problem of yours is not a trifling one at all. Your decision will affect your whole life, and I know how deeply it must worry you. It worried me when I was your age.

In a small Kansas town, 40 years ago, a reasonably strong case could be put up in favor of leaving school early. Most of us knew our lives would be spent on the farm, or in one of the local stores, or at the creamery or elevator. The quickest road to practical knowledge was to
do
. That was the way we might have argued—and rightly, if there were no more to successful living than plowing a straight furrow, wrapping a neat package, keeping a machine well oiled.

Fortunately, we came of stock that set the school on the same plane as the home and church. The value of education had been bred into us. Our families stinted themselves to keep us in school a while longer, and most of us worked, and worked hard, to prolong that while.

Today the business of living is far more complex. No one of us can hope to comprehend all its complexity in a lifetime of study. But each day profitably spent in school will help you understand better your own relationship to country and world. If your generation fails to understand that the individual is still the center, the sole reason for the existence of all man-
made institutions, then complexity will become chaos.

Consequently, I feel firmly that you should continue your schooling—if you can—right to the end of college. You say you are “not too good at books.” I got a moving letter from a young girl halfway through high school. She said that in her studies she seemed to be always trailing. But she concluded: “I still think I can learn to be a good American.”

That's the vital point. School, of course, should train you in the two great basic tools of the mind: the use of words and the use of numbers. And school can properly give you a start toward the special skills you may need in a trade, business or profession. But remember: As soon as you enter an occupation, you will be strongly tempted to fall into the routine of it, to become just a part of that occupation, which is just one part of America. In school—from books, from teachers, from fellow students—you can get a view of the whole of America, how it started, how it grew, what it is, what it means. Each day will add breadth to your view and a sharper comprehension of your own role.

I feel sure I am right when I tell you:
To develop fully your own character you must know your country's character
. A plant partakes of the character of the soil in which it grows. You are a plant that is
conscious,
that
thinks
. You must study your soil—which is your country—in order that you may be able to draw its strength up into your own strength.

It will pay you to do so. You will understand your own problems better and solve them more easily if you have studied America's problems and done something toward their solution. You have to look out for yourself
and
your country. Self-interest and patriotism, rightly considered, are not contradictory ideas. They are partners.

The very earth of our country is gradually getting lost to us. One third of the fertile top layer of our soil has already been washed away into rivers and the sea. This must be stopped or someday our country will be too barren to yield us a living. That is one national problem crying for solution.

In our cities there are millions of people who have little between them and hunger except a daily job, which they may lose. They demand more security. If they feel too insecure, their discontent might someday undermine
your
security, no matter how successful you might be in your own working life. That's another problem, and there are innumerable others.

It is dangerous to assume that our country's welfare belongs alone to that mysterious mechanism called “the government.” Every time we allow or force the government, because of our own individual or local failures, to take over a question that properly belongs to us, by that much we surrender our individual responsibility—and with it freedom. But the very core of what we mean by Americanism is individual liberty, founded on individual responsibility, equality before the law, and a system of private enterprise that aims to reward according to merit.

Yours is a country of free men and women, where personal liberty is cherished as a fundamental right. But liberty is easily lost; the price of its continued possession is untiring alertness.

Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one
leader
and a population of millions of
followers,
it will no longer be America. Any needless concentration of power is a menace to freedom.

World War II was not won by one man or a few men. It was won by hundreds of thousands and millions of men and women of all ranks. Audacity, initiative, the will to try greatly and stubbornly characterized them. Great numbers of them, if for only a few minutes in some desperate crisis of battle, were leaders.

You will find it so in the fields of peace. America at work is not just a few Great Men at the head of government, of corporation or of labor unions. It is millions and millions of men and women who on farms and in factories and in stores, offices and homes are leading this country—and the world—toward better and better ways of doing and making things.

We have the world's best machines because we ourselves are not machines; because we have embraced the liberty of thinking for ourselves, imagining for ourselves, and acting for ourselves out of our own energies and inspirations. Our true strength is not in our machines, splendid as they are, but in the inquisitive, inventive, indomitable souls of our people.

To be that kind of soul is open to every American boy and girl;
and it is the one kind of career that the nation cannot live without
. To be a good American—worthy of the heritage that is yours, eager to pass it on enhanced and enriched—is a lifetime career, stimulating, sometimes exhausting, always satisfying.

Start on it now; take part in America's affairs while you are still a student. “Let no man despise thy youth,” Paul the Apostle said to Timothy. These words apply to you as an American. Loyalty to principle, readiness to give of one's talents to the common good, acceptance of responsibility—in home, neighborhood, school: these are the measure of a good American, not his age in years. Alexander Hamilton—General Washington's aide in war, President Washington's Secretary of the Treasury in peace—was speaking before applauding crowds of his fellow New Yorkers on the political problems of the American Revolution when he was only 17 years old and still a student in King's College, now Columbia University. The same stuff of which he was made is in you.

Above all, while still in school, try to learn the “why” of your country. To assure each citizen his inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: that was the “why” for its continued existence. What that means to you personally, what you must do toward its fulfillment, cannot be answered completely in a letter. But I repeat that the answer can be found in your school, if you seek it deliberately and conscientiously. And need neither genius nor vast learning for its comprehension.

To be a good American is essentially nothing more than being a good member of your community, helping those who need your help, striving for a sympathetic understanding of those who oppose you, doing each new day's job a little better than the previous day's, placing the common good before personal profit. The American Republic was born to assure you the dignity and rights of a human individual. If the dignity and rights of your fellow men guide your daily conduct of life, you will be a good American.

Animal Magnetism

I was
looking through my closet for something to wear, but nothing was calling out to me. So I sought my three-year-old's opinion.

“What do you think I should change into?” I asked.

He thought awhile before replying, “A butterfly.”
Lynn Sherlock

Three Days to See

by helen Keller

March 1933

From
The Atlantic Monthly

I
have often
thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during his early adult life.
Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound.

Now and then I have tested my seeing friends to discover what they see.
Recently I asked a friend, who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, what she had observed. “Nothing in particular,” she replied.

How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note? I who cannot see find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough, shaggy bark of a pine. In spring I touch the branches of trees hopefully in search of a bud, the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter's sleep.
Occasionally, if I am very fortunate, I place my hand gently on a small tree and feel the happy quiver of a bird in full song.

At times my heart cries out with longing to see all these things. If I can get so much pleasure from mere touch, how much more beauty must be revealed by sight. And I have imagined what I should most like to see if I were given the use of my eyes, say, for just three days.

I should divide the period into three parts. On the first day, I should want to see the people whose kindness and companionship have made my life worth living.
I do not know what it is to see into the heart of a friend through that “window of the soul,” the eye. I can only “see” through my fingertips the outline of a face. I can detect laughter, sorrow and many other obvious emotions. I know my friends from the feel of their faces.

How much easier, how much more satisfying it is for you who can see to grasp quickly the essential qualities of another person by watching the subtleties of expression, the quiver of a muscle, the flutter of a hand. But does it ever occur to you to use your sight to see into the inner nature of a friend? Do not most of you seeing people grasp casually the outward features of a face and let it go at that?

For instance, can you describe accurately the faces of five good friends? As an experiment, I have questioned husbands about the color of their wives' eyes, and often they express embarrassed confusion and admit that they do not know.

Oh, the things that I should see if I had the power of sight for just three days!

The first
day would be a busy one. I should call to me all my dear friends and look long into their faces, imprinting upon my mind the outward evidences of the beauty that is within them. I should let my eyes rest, too, on the face of a baby, so that I could catch a vision of the eager, innocent beauty which precedes the individual's consciousness of the conflicts which life develops. I should like to see the books which have been read to me, and which have revealed to me the deepest channels of human life. And I should like to look into the loyal, trusting eyes of my dogs, the little Scottie and the stalwart Great Dane.

In the afternoon I should take a long walk in the woods and intoxicate my eyes on the beauties of the world of Nature. And I should pray for the glory of a colorful sunset. That night, I think, I should not be able to sleep.

The next
day I should arise with the dawn and see the thrilling miracle by which night is transformed into day. I should behold with awe the magnificent panorama of light with which the sun awakens the sleeping earth. This day I should devote to a hasty glimpse of the world, past and present. I should want to see the pageant of man's progress, and so I should go to the museums. There my eyes would see the condensed history of the earth—animals and the races of men pictured in their native environment; gigantic carcasses of dinosaurs and mastodons which roamed the earth before man appeared, with his tiny stature and powerful brain, to conquer the animal kingdom.

My next stop would be the Museum of Art. I know well through my hands the sculptured gods and goddesses of the ancient Nile land. I have felt copies of Parthenon friezes, and I have sensed the rhythmic beauty of charging Athenian warriors. The gnarled, bearded features of Homer are dear to me, for he, too, knew blindness.

So on this, my second day, I should try to probe into the soul of man through his art. The things I knew through touch I should now see. More splendid still, the whole magnificent world of painting would be opened to me. I should be able to get only a superficial impression. Artists tell me that for a deep and true appreciation of art one must educate the eye. One must learn through experience to weigh the merits of line, of composition, of form and color. If I had eyes, how happily would I embark on so fascinating a study!

The evening of my second day I should spend at a theater or at the movies. How I should like to see the fascinating figure of Hamlet, or the gusty Falstaff amid colorful Elizabethan trappings! I cannot enjoy the beauty of rhythmic movement except in a sphere restricted to the touch of my hands. I can vision only dimly the grace of a Pavlova, although I know something of the delight of rhythm, for often I can sense the beat of music as it vibrates through the floor. I can well imagine that cadenced motion must be one of the most pleasing sights in the world. I have been able to gather something of this by tracing with my fingers the lines in sculptured marble; if this static grace can be so lovely, how much more acute must be the thrill of seeing grace in motion.

The following
morning, I should again greet the dawn, anxious to discover new delights, new revelations of beauty. Today, this third day, I shall spend in the workaday world, amid the haunts of men going about the business of life.
The city becomes my destination.

First, I stand at a busy corner, merely looking at people, trying by sight of them to understand something of their daily lives. I see smiles, and I am happy. I see serious determination, and I am proud. I see suffering, and I am compassionate.

I stroll down Fifth Avenue. I throw my eyes out of focus, so that I see no particular object but only a seething kaleidoscope of color. I am certain that the colors of women's dresses moving in a throng must be a gorgeous spectacle of which I should never tire. But perhaps if I had sight I should be like most other women—too interested in styles to give much attention to the splendor of color in the mass.

From Fifth Avenue I make a tour of the city—to the slums, to factories, to parks where children play. I take a stay-at-home trip abroad by visiting the foreign quarters. Always my eyes are open wide to all the sights of both happiness and misery so that I may probe deep and add to my understanding of how people work and live.

My third day of sight is drawing to an end. Perhaps there are many serious pursuits to which I should devote the few remaining hours, but I am afraid that on the evening of that last day I should again run away to the theater, to a hilariously funny play, so that I might appreciate the overtones of comedy in the human spirit.

At midnight permanent night would close in on me again. Naturally in those three short days I should not have seen all I wanted to see. Only when darkness had again descended upon me should I realize how much I had left unseen.

Perhaps this short outline does not agree with the program you might set for yourself if you knew that you were about to be stricken blind. I am, however, sure that if you faced that fate you would use your eyes as never before. Everything you saw would become dear to you. Your eyes would touch and embrace every object that came within your range of vision. Then, at last, you would really see, and a new world of beauty would open itself before you.

I who
am blind can give one hint to those who see: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again.
Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, I am sure that sight must be the most delightful.