[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 66 (Wednesday, May 24, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4370-S4371]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
JAROSLAV PELIKAN, STERLING PROFESSOR EMERITUS
Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, as a product of the World War II years, I
rushed through my undergraduate education after that war. In the
process, my education was of the Yogi Berra variety: If I came to a
fork in the road, I took it.
Now, having acquired seniority here, I have privileges I never
dreamed would be part of my life, and am more and more aware of what I
missed by not spending more time in basic educational endeavors.
For instance, because of my service on the Senate Rules Committee, it
is my honor to be chairman of the Joint committee of the Library. This
position opened my eyes and ears and filled my mind with joys totally
unexpected.
For instance, my increasing visits with Dr. Jim Billington, Librarian
of the Library of Congress, a national treasure and our preeminent
Russian scholar, have led to meeting more and more of the distinguished
academics of our time.
One of these persons is Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor Emeritus
at Yale university and Immediate Past President of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. Sadly, because of business here in the Senate, I
missed Dr. Pelikan's brilliant luncheon address to the Bicentennial of
the Library of Congress on April 24 of this
[[Page S4371]]
year. Arriving late, I was overwhelmed by the comments about his speech
to the ``Library Legends Luncheon'' and requested a copy of it. The
title of this address was: ``Hospital for the Soul.''
Now, I realize why we address those who have received Phd's as
``Doctor''. On behalf of all who have continued to support our Library
of Congress, I thank Jaroslav Pelikan for all he has done to earn his
``Living Legend'' Award. Because of this address, I shall never again
think of libraries as simply depositories for books. Our great Library
of Congress is now the ``World's Hospital for the Soul.''
I ask unanimous consent that Dr. Pelikan's address be printed in the
Record.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Hospital for the Soul
(By Jaroslav Pelikan)
Thank you for this ``Living Legend'' Award: I promise to
take it out and look at it whenever I get a sudden attack of
humility. Seriously, though, even someone to whom humility
does not come easily would have to be humbled today by the
names of all these others who are being honored here--and
then of those who are not! And if I ask myself the even more
humbling question why it is I who have been asked to speak in
the name of these men and women who are becoming my new
colleagues, my first thought is that I seem to be the only
one among those present whose last name puts him into the
same class with Big Bird. (Big Bird's cousin Larry Bird, who
is also a Living Legend, was unavoidably detained, and as a
sometime Hoosier I with his Pacers well in the playoffs.) Or
is the explanation simply that I am, at least as much as
anyone here, the offspring of the library? Or perhaps it is
that all my life I have been studying various languages,
which, while only a small fraction of those represented by
the collections of the Library of Congress, do manage to
include the ancestral tongues of several of my classmates, as
well as ``the universal language'' played so eloquently by
Maestro Isaac Stern or by my dear friend Yo-Yo Ma.
But of all languages, there is a special place reserved in
my mind and heart for Greek, the language of Plato and
Sophocles and Sappho (whom Plato called ``the Tenth Muse'')--
and the language of the New Testament and of the ``Four
Cappadocians'' (Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of
Nyssa, their sister Macrina, and Gregory of Nazianzus). So
let me turn, as I do so often, to the pleasures of Greek. For
in Book One of a work appropriately entitled Bibliotheke
[Library], the Hellenistic historian Diodorus Siculus reports
that the inscription on the Library of Alexandria read:
Pysches iatreion, ``Hospital for the soul''--a profound and
brilliant metaphor, even in a language justly celebrated for
its metaphors.
The library is a hospital for the soul because it is here
that the soul can find instruments for diagnosis. Those men
and women, physicians of the soul, who have thought deeply
and spoken movingly about the illnesses that plague us all
have put their case studies permanently on deposit here. It
is here in the library that Thomas Jefferson traces so many
ailments to the dreadful affliction of not holding together
``an honest heart'' and ``a knowing head''; here in the
library that George Eliot devastatingly portrays in
Middlemarch, my favorite English novel, the pedant who, she
says, ``dreams footnotes'' and who lurks in the soul of every
scholar (present company excepted, of course!); here in the
library that, in my favorite novel of all, the Grand
Inquisitor propounds again the three questions in which ``are
united all the unresolved contradictions of human nature'',
here in the library that Gibbons, celebrated in the Great
Hall, carries out an autopsy on ``the natural and inevitable
effect of immoderate greatness'' that bears implications for
every other empire, also for the American empire; here in the
library that Immanuel Kant probes ``the radical evil that
corrupts all maxims,'' making the worse appear the better
reason; and here in the library that Beatrice, in her
quiet but solemn voice, warns us that all our actions
carry consequences regardless of our station, evade them
though we may for a very long time. And because, in the
deathless words of that celebrated scholar and philosopher
Professor Pogo of Okefenokee Swamp (whose sayings are also
preserved here in the library), ``We got problems we ain't
even used yet,'' men and women in generations yet to come
will keep turning here for diagnosis and help. But they
will be able to do so only if we in this generation have
the foresight and the commitment that Joseph had in Egypt,
to store up during the fat years what will be needed
during the lean years.
It is likewise to the library that the soul can turn for
healing, in the collective memory of the human race. Even for
the healing of the soul in a special sense, the writers of
the New Testament, in trying to find the most towering and
luminous metaphor of all to cope with the miracle and the
mystery of what had happened to them, turned to the miracle
and the mystery of language: ``In the beginning was the
Word.'' But by that metaphor they were in fact attaching
themselves to the far more comprehensive tradition of what
Pedro Lain Entralgo has called ``the therapy of the word in
Classical Antiquity,'' the ancient and yet universal
recognition that if the diseases of the human mind and spirit
are to be cured, they need to be (as we still say) addressed,
that means, spoken to, as they are by biography and
autobiography and hagiography from many traditions and
diverse cultures, including even our own past, as those can
be found in the library and only there. Corny though the
cynical may find it, these lives do indeed still
. . . remind us,
We can make our lives sublime.
But increasingly we are beginning to recognize that both
diagnosis and healing can be vastly more successful if we
have been using the resources of the hospital and the health
care system all along for prevention, which is why the
library must be, as we say nowadays, a ``research hospital''
and a ``teaching hospital.'' Having spent a scholarly
lifetime learning and admonishing that there is a fundamental
distinction between knowledge and wisdom, I find myself today
stressing the even more fundamental, and even more elusive,
distinction between knowledge and information. The library
functions as a hospital for the soul by teaching us both of
those distinctions, making available enormous stores of
information, resources of knowledge, and, to those who have
the willingness and patience to learn, treasures of wisdom.
(Konrad Adenauer once said that he planned to ask the
Almighty, ``Why is it, after putting such limitations on
human intelligence, that You did not put similar ones on
human stupidity?'') As the chroniclers and commentators and
critics of all those traditions, scholars dependent on the
library, by introducing us to our grandfathers and more
recently to our long lost grandmothers, can help us to
bequeath these riches to our grandchildren. For in words of
Edmund Burke, who still speaks in the library, it can be
defined as ``a partnership in all science; a partnership in
all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all
perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be
obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not
only between those who are living, but between those who are
living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.''
On that particular program for universal health care, my
old friend, Mr. Librarian of Congress--and (at least for
today) Dr. Surgeon General of the Hospital for the Soul--
everyone would, I hope, have to agree, even in an election
year. It was, I firmly believe, providential that exactly 200
years ago today, in this city where there would eventually be
so many fiefdoms and kingdoms and dukedoms and monuments, the
Congress was inspired to found this monumental institution,
of which Shakespeare has Prospero say prophetically, ``My
library was dukedom large enough.'' For as all the other
dukedoms have risen and fallen, the Library of Congress has
stood as a monument and a ``hospital for the soul,'' pointing
to the life of the mind as the antidote to the twin poisons
of political tyranny and moral anarchy.
Whenever people ask me, after more than half a century of
historical research, reflection, and writing (my Three R's),
what are the lessons of the past, I apologize that I can't
come up with very many. But there is one, which those of you
who know me will not be surprised to learn I find stated most
profoundly by Goethe's Faust; and it speaks of the library:
``Was du ererbt von deinen Vatern hast, Erwirb' es, um es
zu besitzen.''
[What you have as heritage, now take as task; For only thus
will you make it your own.]
____________________