Information Received

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 663, 21 March 1952, Page 16

Information Received

by

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 26

takes me more seriously than I have ever been able to take myself has written to say that if I had listened to the Farm Session of 2YA I would not have said when King George died that no one seemed to remember his farming activities. Some one did remember them and spoke about them — for as long as it takes to say 146 words. So I gather that he either did not remember very much A CORRESPONDENT who

or found a minute as much time as he could spare. The

fact of course is that when news breaks as suddenly as that event did no one is ready for it. Journalists don’t run about with obituaries hanging from the ends of their pencils. Nor can radio reporters be expected to carry them on the tips of

their tongues. They require time, as journalists do, to come into action, and it is not.a reflection on them to say that ethey still have a few tricks to learn. The oldest broadcasting service in the world is a toddler beside the oldest newspaper and it may beat the newspaper to the post, having wings where the newspaper has wheels, but only foolish radio reporters suppose that it is possible to learn as much in 20 years as in 200. However, when I said that no one seemed to remember the King as a farmer I was not thinking of reporters. I was thinking of the public men whose tributes filled the air and the newspapers. That still small voice from 2YA was like my own furtive little note-not very impressive, but the best we could do at (continued on next page)

and in the time, and like Kipling’s tri-| bute to the little old lady of ‘Windsor, re: 7 ied it ; if ¢ 5 was well a va a. -_ a

FEBRUARY 27

er owe ae WILL confess, while I am on this business of reporting, that one of my unworthy pleasures is listening to the same story from two sides of a fence. It

does happen now and, again that it is the same story

in every important detail. That happened not many days ago when I heard two almost identical accounts of a neighbours’ quarrel-one from the aggressor and the other from the victim, But it happens so rarely that I find myself wondering still how it came about in this case. As a rule the variation is so wide and so emphatic, that nothing remains with me afterwards but this secret query: Are they innocents or liars? They need not, of course, be one or the other, and in most cases they are not. They are moral cowards, as we all aré most of the time, and admiration hungry, as most of us are all the time. I once read a book about America in which the author set out to prove that the explanation of everything good and bad in America’s relations with the rest of the world is the average American’s desire to be loved. Long before I reached the last chapter I knew that the author was talking nonsense. It was not all nonsense. Some of it was true, and much of it half true, and it was all true to this extent that it would be easier to sustain an argument of that kind against America than against any other great nation. The Americans are not only the youngest of the great nations. They are the youngest nation the world has ever seen wielding such power. It is not surprising that they are as eager as youth always is to be admired, and as troubled as it always is if they think they are not admired enough. But they are incorrigible corrupters of recorded history. What the British used to tell the world with one hand in their pocket and the other on their heart, the Americans tell with both hands clasped and with their eyes fixed anxiously on the world’s changing expression. It is a halftrue story, and the trouble with half-true reporting is that cynics believe none of it and innocents swallow it hook, line and sinker. =e So I get back to my neighbours’ quarrel about Mr, Churchill. One said that he went to Washington to sign on America’s dotted line. The other said that there was no space left on the line since Mr. Attlee was in Washington. Before long both were dupes, fools, liars. One threat- ened to punch the other’s head. The other refused to argue any longer with a 40-years-old kid. Friends interposed and all went home, both told the same story . afterwards, Ge ite, I don’t know why it turn that, since men who quarrel as these did don’t often use rately or conscientiously, Theif tongues are undisciplined because their minds are. I have to suppose either that I have known two completely honest men or that these two men were completely indifferent to my opinion of them. * x *

FEBRUARY 28

"THOREAU, who dropped some of. his most devastating remarks in odd corners that no one today explores, woke me up this afternoon with a word or two

on the origin of . wind. I was watchine a crass fire

moving in the direction of my boundary, and wondering at what point in the advance I should muster and move my

sheep. To fill in the time I opened A Week on the Concord and started to reread the thoughts that passed through the author’s mind as he floated with his brother down that sluggish,little river one Sunday morning 113 years ago. After a page or two my mind and my eyes parted company, as they so often do when I read in the open, and then he hit me hard with this tough nut: These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive. and simple form; as ancient and honourable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, but we read that Aristeus "obtained of Jupiter and Neptune, that the pestilential heat of the dog days, wherein was great mortality, . should be mitigated with wind.’’ This is one of those dateless benefits conferred on man which has no record in our vulgar day, though we still find some similitude to them in our ‘dreams, in which we have a more liberal and a juster apprehension of things, unconstrained by habit, which is thee in some measure put off, and divested of memory, which we call history. I have my own opinion about that "dateless benefit" which I have often regarded as a primeval curse? But while I was still pondering on that passage, and wondering where to draw the line between the poet and the philosopher, the wind changed direction on top of the hill, and gave the 250 hard-pressed beaters their first chance to gain control. If this explanation, given to me by a schoolboy three hours later, turns out to be a dream and not history, it is no dream that the fire is now out and the wind blowing strongly away from me. : (To be continued.)