Spencer Heath Archive

Item 328

Random dictation by Heath for Spencer MacCallum

January, 1954

     All our ancient institutions tell us that the real things are things that abide. Because of their own nature they must abide. The supreme lesson of Plato was that the real is not the transitory but the everlasting. For with him only the real, the abiding, was the real. The modern age with its accent on degradation and war has tried to reverse this concept, beginning perhaps with Zola as a novelist. Those things like poverty, disease, and degradation, all of which are but overtures to extinction, began to be called the real. Not because they were at all enduring. Perhaps because they were the most poignant in human suffering and sensation. Zola, followed by Ibsen and Shaw and most of the successful novelists and playwrights of our present day, have been and still are, wallowing in the transitory, in every aspect of degradation and dissolution in human life and character, neglecting almost completely the other side of life which is beautiful because creative, and divine because that alone can abide. /Chuckling/ Here endeth the lesson.