Alfred Kazin's Journals by Alfred Kazin

Author:Alfred Kazin [Kazin, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Literary Figures
ISBN: 9780300142037
Google: rnU-vzEQjKcC
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2011-01-01T20:43:16+00:00

June 5, 1963

Picture of the Pope122 being borne from his Vatican apartments to St. Peter's where he will lie in state. Now the mumbo-jumbo begins in earnest—just a feeble flicker of the man himself still around. For me, his example has been overwhelming. These four or so years have gradually worked a revolution in me and in so many other people—I have a sense of moral liberation because of him. Suddenly it becomes possible to say—yea or nay again, right or wrong, to discriminate between good and evil in everything. The important point about this kind of personal faith is that it abolishes the pathos of distance which morally we feel about so many events these days. Clancy Segal,123 who came over to the university yesterday, sat in front of the Greek Theater talking about the “brick wall” which radicals feel about political and social upsets of the supposed march of history. But there is a dimension of personal and moral freedom that is present in confronting what is happening so long as we are not afraid to call things by their right names, so long as we can say yea or nay. … I am more and more convinced that this dimension of personal freedom—the freedom to choose—the freedom to call things by their right names—is decisive. Only this individual sense of good and evil can abolish the pathetic sense of being a disappointed spectator and onlooker, a reader of the historical fortunes. History is now—“this society is mine,”—every day is the decisive stage.

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