January 6, 2023
I have always loved the visual arts because of their stillness. A painting or a sculpture does not move. It is at rest. Even if it depicts the most furious motion, that motion is caught in a moment that we call “aesthetic arrest,” and in fact that moment is the goal of the art. It turns a fleeting and perhaps otherwise inconsequential tick of the clock into a revelation. Revelation of what? Not of the content itself, necessarily. The content may be completely commonplace—a bowl of fruit, if the painter is Cezanne—or even homely, in all senses, like van Gogh’s famous pair of muddy boots. When Stephen Dedalus, the fictional counterpart of James Joyce himself in his autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, expounds his theory of art and its capacity to produce epiphanies, he chooses a basket on top of the head of a boy in the crowd. What makes the fruit, the boots, the basket from an everyday reality into a work of art is not the frame of the painting, the pedestal of the sculpture, or the museum label: those are signals, inviting the viewers to perform a particular act of attention, to look upon what is before them with the eye of the imagination rather than the eye of habit. If that happens, the objects become presences. To be present is to be here and now, which means that for that moment, time is conquered, for time is normally leaping forward into the future even as it is disappearing into the past. “Now” in fact never exists except in such a moment of timeless aesthetic arrest. It occurs to me that it is appropriate that this newsletter will appear on the Feast of the Epiphany.
Art museums are among my favorite places, giving me a sense of peace comparable to what I feel in a church—an old-fashioned church, not one of the abstract and brightly lit postmodern ones. Indeed, we do not value the old cathedrals just for their rituals but for the paintings, sculptures, and stained glass that form a temenos or sacred space, giving the ritual much of its mood and transformative power. Why else would medieval people have spent as much as a century building one cathedral? In an art museum, people are slowly, quietly meditating, removed from the lives they have left outside, and where else in our society does that happen today? The painting, sculpture, or photograph they are meditating upon is a “still life” even if it portrays a horse race.
In our era, love of stillness is a guilty pleasure. We are not supposed to like stillness: both modern theory and modern lifestyle have repudiated it. It is true that perhaps a third of the population, especially the younger population, are sunk into the paralysis of depression, into what the Renaissance called melancholia and the Middle Ages acedia, or sloth. But I have been noticing an increase among students of the opposite, of hyperactivity, ADHD, and I wonder which syndrome is a backlash against the other. I also do not wonder about, but constantly witness, the role of their phones in this syndrome: they check them constantly and compulsively, and tell me they are stimulated by them even after getting into bed at night, still checking, still scrolling. The role of technology in increasing the pace of modern life, especially the pace of change, is hardly news: Northrop Frye was already analyzing it in The Modern Century in 1967, prompted by his return from Expo 67, the Montreal World’s Fair, which, as world’s fairs did in those days, proffered a “world of tomorrow” vision of all the wonderful changes that the next century was going to experience, thanks to the wonders of technology. Three years later, Alvin Toffler published Future Shock, a title that became a household word. It is no accident that Future Shock was a favorite of Newt Gingrich, who helped foment the right-wing reaction against “elites”—in other words, against the highly educated, technology-savvy class that profited and continues to profit from the technologizing of the world—by those who were left out of the loop. But both the winners and the losers suffer from future shock, which could be characterized as the experience of a cartoon character running desperately across a bridge that is disintegrating immediately behind him. In the last dozen years, the main service performed by social media has been to exacerbate the hyperstimulated condition of society. The purpose of Twitter is to make people angry, to keep poking Bruce Banner until finally his rage turns him into the incredible Hulk. I think the MAGA crowd loves “triggering the libs” because it is revenge: let them become as angry and upset as we are.
Sociologist Juliet Shor pointed out 30 years ago in The Overworked American that capitalism depends on hyperactivity. What is disguised as the morality of a “work ethic” is really the logic of the capitalist system working itself out as the world moved from an economy of scarcity into an economy of abundance. Capitalism must constantly seek new markets or the expansion of old ones, and once everyone has the basics of life, it is faced with the task of creating new desires through psychological manipulation. Advertising stresses new, improved versions of everything, new options, along with planned obsolescence. A lot of these tactics were worked out in the auto industry, so that my new car is new full of computerized gadgets, 95% of which I do not use. The cult of continuous improvement spread everywhere, however, including into academia. Faculty are supposed to demonstrate, not just that they can do their job effectively, but that they are continuously improving, growing, learning new magical techniques that will transform the age-old act of enlightening and inspiring students. The university itself is supposed to be ceaselessly “assessing” every single thing it does, demonstrating to the accrediting agency how it plans to improve, which results in constant changes to the way things are done, taking much of the faculty’s time and energy just trying to keep up with the changes. Of those changes, 95% of them are like the gadgets on my car, useless but giving the appearance of progress, popular with the technophiles who like to play with new toys but exhausting to those who want to focus on teaching and scholarship.
Modern consciousness is restless, driven, never satisfied, always seeking change. As I have touched upon in other contexts, the great symbol of this restlessness is Faust, especially Goethe’s Faust, who makes a bet with the devil Mephistopheles:
should Mephistopheles grant Faust a moment so satisfying that Faust says, “Stay, you are so fair!”—then the devil wins the wager. Faust holds out till the age of 100 before his energy flags enough for him to surrender and wish for a moment’s stillness. Goethe’s version is radically revisionist of a medieval legend in which Faust was simply damned, as he is in Marlowe’s stage version Dr. Faustus. Although in many ways an antihero, Goethe’s Faust is actually saved, and the reason is that he never stops striving. The epilogue makes clear that he will somehow continue growing and striving in the afterlife. In a flash of genius, Spengler characterized Western culture as “Faustian.” However Spengler intended the term, it was not a compliment.
In traditional mythology, up to the great modern transvaluation that began with the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th century, the ultimate value was changelessness. Change implies imperfection, and there was an old quibble that God cannot move because he is perfect and to change in any way implies imperfection. The transient nature of time was contrasted with the abiding nature of Eternity; the imperfection of the fallen “sublunary” world below the orbit of the moon was contrasted with the changelessness of the heavenly spheres, which moved, yet moved in a perfect order, an order that repeated itself endlessly and thus changelessly, as in a dance in which the dancers return to their original position at the end. This image of beautiful and perfect order as a dance forms the basis of Sir John Davies’ wonderful poem Orchestra. Contrastingly, change in the world beneath the ever-changing moon was what the Renaissance called “mutabilitie,” the very definition of fallenness. Mutabilitie implies what I have noted in other newsletters, that the Fall was not a one-time event but happens again in every moment. Change is the great curse, to be transcended, not celebrated.
The Classical precedent for the mythology of changelessness lay in Platonism, which is why both medieval and Renaissance Christianity were deeply Neoplatonic, despite the prestige of Aristotelian logic. Plato asserts the reality of perfect and unchanging Forms or Ideas beyond the flux of ordinary experience, which is largely illusion. The one contemporary philosopher that Plato puts on the level of Socrates and seems a little in awe of is Parmenides, who said that in fact nothing ever really does change. Change implies difference: to change is to move from one condition to something different, and difference does not really exist either. By logical necessity, all that exists is changeless unity, the One. In typical academic fashion, one extreme position provoked an equal but opposite extreme reaction, and Parmenides’ opposite number is Heraclitus, the fellow who said that no one steps twice in the same river, a vision of ceaseless flux apparently so depressing that Heraclitus was known as the weeping philosopher. Yet that is too simple, for Heraclitus also speaks of a logos, an order principle inherent in the changing world.
In The Productions of Time I spoke of the two faces of mythology as the vision of order and the vision of love or desire. The vision of order is contemplative, and its metaphors are primarily visual. To contemplate is to detach from something and view it from some distance objectively. The entire mythological cosmos summed up in a single form is the visual emblem of the mandala, a circle with a cross in it signifying the unity of opposites, an objective correlative of Heraclitus’s logos, which is also a unity of opposites in creative tension—like that of the bow or the lyre, as he says. The mandala image is worldwide: it appears repeatedly in the enormous contemplative epiphany of Dante’s Paradiso, but in fact the term is taken from Tibetan Buddhism, whose monks use mandalas as a focus of meditation. Medieval Christianity was predominantly a contemplative Christianity: in its early years, adherents sought the solitude of the desert, in later years the silence of the monasteries in order to contemplate.
Then it all…changed, and the change was what Jung (taking a word from Heraclitus) called enantiodromia, the psyche’s counterbalancing swing to the opposite when consciousness has become too one-sided. Over the centuries, the need for stillness produced a temptation to achieve that stillness, that order and security, by authoritarian coercion. The desire for contemplative stillness has a shadow, and that shadow takes the form of a will to power imposing changelessness from the top down. It is, sadly, both in earlier times and in some modern intellectuals, always tempted by the supposed “necessity” of a hierarchical authority that will make the world unified and changeless for its own good. Such a temptation led the early Church to persecute “heresy”; by the late Middle Ages, the ideal of a changeless unity—the very meaning of the word “Catholic”—had largely become a pretext for the institutional elite’s preservation of its power and privilege at all costs. The same thing has happened over the decades in Iran, now dominated by clerics for whom religion is a mere excuse for maintaining their position of dominance. The commonest betrayal of intellectuals in our time is to falsify their own vision by arguing the supposed need for authoritarianismism in order to create a harmonious, conflict-free and therefore changeless society in which everyone sings in eternally in unison—or else. The revolution that took place, religiously in the Reformation, politically and culturally in the Romantic period, rejected the ideals of changelessness and unity in favor of their opposites, and we are still working out the consequences of that revolution.
Traditional mythology had in fact recognized that the perfect changelessness of Eternity had what Northrop Frye would call a demonic parody. After all, hell is also an eternal, changeless state, but demonic changelessness takes two forms, seemingly opposite but actually identical. As the beautiful dance of the starry heavens only confirms the changelessness of an eternal order, so the ceaseless, compulsive activity of some of the damned, particularly on the higher levels, only confirms the changelessness of their fate. The Uncommitted are compelled to run ceaselessly after a banner representing a cause or ideal, because they refused to march under any banner during their lifetime. The Lustful are spun in a gigantic whirlwind representing the storm of desire that swept them away, and the sodomites must constantly run on burning sands that represent the sterility of their desire. Yet the more things change for the damned, the more they remain the same. These furiously energetic activities are utterly pointless, and therefore in a real sense not activity at all, only the parody of true action. Shakespeare portrays the same paradox in Macbeth, whose furious attempts to cover up his murder of King Duncan intensify into genocide, yet, as Macbeth finally recognizes, all the sound and fury signifies nothing. It is just tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
On the lowest levels of hell, this kind of pseudo-action reveals its underlying truth in the form of paralysis. The figures in lowest hell are progressively frozen into ice, until those in the lowest zone of the 9th circle are entirely encased. Demonic changelessness is not some old-fashioned cautionary tale: it is the form of human alienation in any age, a kind of life-in-death. The first sentence of the first story in James Joyce’s Dubliners is, “Every night I used to whisper to myself the word paralysis.” Every character in the collection is paralyzed in one way or other, trapped in a dead-end life and, indeed, dead themselves without knowing it. The same is true of the characters in T.S. Eliot’s brief epic The Waste Land, which quotes a line from the Inferno: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
I think there is a real connection between this vision of hyperkinetic activity that is really a disguise for a kind of frozenness and my early observation about the seeming contrast between hyperactive and depressed students. It is in fact very Heraclitean, opposites that turn into each other because they are actually two faces of the same dysfunction. In the opening of Goethe’s poem, Faust is deeply depressed and comes close to committing suicide. Enter Mephistopheles with his offer to throw Faust out the door into a whirling, madcap life. Anything, even a witches’ Sabbath, so as not to have time to think and thus fall back into the Slough of Despond.
Historians have become more aware of the danger of writing narrative history as a simple, linear chain of causality: this led to that, which in turn led to that. Life in time is causal, but causality is a webwork. All aspects of reality are interconnected, so that a change at any one point ripples in all directions, causing many other simultaneous changes. Thus, we have suggested that the shift from an ideology of changelessness to one of constant change was a repudiation of the old authoritarian hierarchal mythology after it had become corrupt, that it was a working out of the logic of capitalism, that it was an effect of the rise of science and continuous technological innovation. All of these causes were true, and we could add more: the impact of Darwinian evolutionary theory, for example, that proved that nature was not a fixed, hierarchical Chain of Being but an unending metamorphosis. I think this is what the young Northrop Frye really got out of Spengler, discarding Spengler’s neo-Nazi foolishness. Diachronically, The Decline of the West challenges the myth of progress with a cyclical myth of rise, decline, and fall. But synchronically it presents a culture as a symbolic complex in which everything reflects—and affects—everything else like the net of gems in Eastern mythology.
At any rate, modern literature and critical theory both reflect and respond to the new vision of constant change and also help to create it. Northrop Frye opens The Modern Century with observations on the quickening pace of modern life:
One very obvious feature of our age is the speeding up of process: it is an age of revolution and metamorphosis, where one lives through changes that formerly took centuries in a matter of a few years. (10)
He goes on to say, a bit later:
The first reactions to the new sensation—for it was more of a sensation than a conception—were exhilarating, as all swift movement is for a time. The prestige of the myth of progress developed a number of value-assumptions: the dynamic is better than the static, process better than product, the organic and vital better than the mechanical and fixed, and so on….And yet there was an underlying tendency to alienation in the concept of progress itself. (16)
Those value assumptions were first reflected in the new mythology of many Romantic writers. Goethe celebrated—however ambivalently—Faust’s ceaseless striving. Blake’s early work heralded change in every direction: he wrote poems about the French and American revolutions, a poem advocating sexual liberation, and, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, favored energy and desire over the timid conservatism that clings to sameness out of a desire for security. In his mythological works, the fiery-haired character called Orc is the very spirit of change, a revolutionary, Promethean figure whose antagonist is the frozen Urizen, a patriarchal tyrant who tries to insist on “One law for all.”
While Frye is one of the great theorists of Romanticism, in The Modern Century he explores how this new mythology worked itself out in the post-Romantic period beginning around 1867:
At the beginning of the Romantic period around 1800, an increased energy of propulsion had begun to make itself felt, an energy that often suggests something mechanical. When the eighteenth-century American composer Billings developed contrapuntal hymn-settings which he called “fuguing-tunes,” he remarked that they would be “more than twenty times as powerful as the old slow tunes.” The quantitative comparison, the engineering metaphor, the emphasis on speed and power, indicate a new kind of sensibility already present in pre-Revolutionary and pre-industrial America. Much greater music than his is touched by the same feeling: the finale of Mozart’s Linz Symphony in C is based on the bodily rhythm of the dance, but the finale of Beethoven’s Rasoumovsky Quartet in the same key foreshadows the world of the express train. (35)
But, as Frye goes on to explain, the new celebration of speed, energy, and progress harbored within itself an ambivalence that, as the modern century went on, manifested itself as another enantiodromia, a counterbalancing swing to the opposite tendency. In poetry, Ezra Pound’s motto “Make It New” became a battle cry, but at the same time Pound was a chief innovator of the Modernist poetic technique of fragmentation, a deliberate disruption of old-style linear meter in favor of seemingly disparate fragments, so that the poem becomes a puzzle whose pieces have to be put together by an active reader. The fragmented surface texture of Pound’s Cantos or T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (edited by Pound) represents a modern, alienated consciousness that is inherently paralyzed, expressed by a line from The Waste Land: “On Margate Sands I can connect nothing with nothing.”
There is thus a gradual shifting from the Romantic celebration of revolutionary change as a progressive liberation of energy to Modernist skepticism about change. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872, 1886), Nietzsche defined Greek tragedy as the union of two tendencies, symbolized by the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the god of the sun, of the bright-lit visual world, and the Apollonian is the spirit of order, clarity, reason, form, and restraint—it is the spirit of stillness. But the Greek theatre emerged from the festival of a very different god, Dionysus, the spirit of energy and emotional abandon, associated with the temporal arts of music and dance. In his later work, Nietzsche championed the Dionysian: his Overman (or Superman) would be the embodiment of the Dionysian spirit of ceaseless self-transcendence. Yet the louder Nietzsche sounded the praises of the Dionysian spirit, the more his imagination insisted that all self-transcendence is trapped in “the eternal recurrence of the same”—in other words, in the paralyzed demonic compulsion to repeat that we have seen before.
Thus Modernism, which began as a revolutionary movement espousing Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values,” increasingly became a conservative movement, many of whose representatives ended trapped in a reactionary nostalgia for some kind of pre-modern changeless unity, often symbolized by an idealized medieval Christianity. As a reaction to Modernist reaction, so to speak, the various philosophical and literary theories that emerged beginning in the revolutionary 60’s under the catch-all terms postmodernist and post-structuralist were yet another enantiodromia, at times a radical repudiation of the very possibility of stillness. Post-structuralism “deconstructed” the concept of structure, with its inherent visual metaphor. Structure is an illusion produced by subordinating various parts to the unifying tyranny of a center—but all centers are really acts of violence, assertions of power, whether the structure is political or textual. The philosopher Jacques Derrida deconstructed the unity of time as well as of space. There is no such thing as now (let alone an Eternal Now). Every moment is inhabited by the hidden trace of both the past and the future. There is no rest, only continuous change; no unity, only the proliferation of difference. Derrida was fascinated by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, for which Joyce developed an experimental style in order to represent all of history as a flux in which every moment is inhabited by all the other moments of history, a simultaneity that Joyce suggests by a language of puns and portmanteau words, words that mean more than one thing at a time. The early poetry of Dylan Thomas, influenced by the Wake, identified the moment of birth with the moment of death, and the moment of writing the poem with both of them, in a dizzying series of paradoxes.
The literary ancestor of Joyce and Thomas is Ovid, who employed over 200 stories from traditional Greek mythology as vehicle for the very untraditional vision of all life as unending metamorphosis, ceaseless change with no stability whatever. In the last book of his Metamorphoses, he compares the myths he has been retelling of people turned into trees and flowers to natural phenomena such as the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies or tadpoles into frogs. He also dares to suggest that the Roman Empire, newly established precisely for the purpose of enforcing stability and order, is simply going to decline and fall as Troy once did. Ovid was exiled by the emperor Caesar Augustus. Critics say it was not because of the Metamorphoses, yet that work was more subversive than any “immorality” in which Ovid may have been caught up in high-level social circles.
Frye points to another effect of the ideology of change, growth, and progress on the arts. The pressure to “Make It New” has led to a new kind of artistic career in which artists are constantly re-inventing themselves, going through new developmental phases, never satisfied with their current style but always going through new “periods.” The self-questioning and self-invention that drives adolescents to experiment with new looks and kinds of behavior has a parallel across the whole spectrum of the arts, musical, literary, and visual. Frye’s example in literature is Yeats, whose earlier and later poetry are so different that they seem to be by two different poets:
Yeats is one of the growing poets: his technique, his ideas, his attitude to life, are in a constant state of revolution and metamorphosis. He belongs with Goethe and Beethoven, not with the artists who simply unfold, like Blake and Mozart. This phenomenon of metamorphic growth, which must surely have reached its limit in Picasso, seems to be comparatively new in the arts, and so a somewhat unwelcome characteristic to Yeats himself, who preferred the more traditional unfolding rhythm. (“Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,”58)
He expands upon this observation in The Modern Century:
I hear of painters, even in Canada, who have frantically changed their styles completely three or four times in a few years, a collectors demanded first abstract expressionism, then pop art, then pornography, then hard-edge, selling off their previous purchases as soon as the new vogue took hold. There is a medieval legend of the Wild Hunt, in which souls of the dead had to keep marching to nowhere all day and all night at top speed. Anyone who dropped out of line from exhaustion instantly crumbled to dust. This seems a parable of a type of consciousness frequent in the modern world, obsessed by a compulsion to keep up, reduced to despair by the steadily increasing speed of the total movement. (11)
Popular, commercial art is if anything even more subject to a pressure to make it new. Is Taylor Swift breaking new ground or merely repeating her previous successes? The critics, if not the fans, are unforgiving of the latter.
I think our frazzled, future-shocked culture is overdue for an enantiodromia, a righting of the balance, a return to the ideal of stillness. “Teach us to sit still,” T.S. Eliot prays in Ash Wednesday. I think we would do well to pray with him, recognizing the kernel of wisdom in this passage and extracting it from its context in Eliot’s reactionary ideology. Stillness is not always life-in-death: it may, in fact, be the moment at the center that grounds all the changes. A famous expression of this is in another Eliot poem, “Burnt Norton”:
At the still point in the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Over half a century of postmodern, post-structuralist thought dismisses this as “mystification.” But radical thought may have its own mystifications. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra defines yoga as the intentional stilling of the mind-stuff. The mind is like a troubled pond: the goal of yoga is to still that vexation, to achieve the peaceful stillness that reflects reality undistorted. A number of modern artists seem to me to have achieved something of that stillness: in poetry, I think of Wallace Stevens, and it is no accident that Stevens was a collector of paintings and that some of his famous poems, such as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “The Anecdote of the Jar,” concern the perspectival power of the imagination, its capacity for producing epiphanies through focused attention. In the visual arts, I think of the sculptures of Henry Moore, whose endless variations on humanlike figures reclining in a landscape of which they seem an outgrowth always comfort me, inducing a peacefulness that is not merely sentimentality. We may note that Stevens and Moore are content to play variations on a theme in work after work. Much of Stevens’ poetry, especially the later poetry, is in quietly meditative blank-verse tercets, often in numbered sections. He gives the sense that all his poems are really parts of one great poem. Moore’s relaxed, reclining figures are the opposite of the kind of histrionic art that is constantly straining after new effects.
Jung spoke of psychic development as a process of individuation, yet perhaps process need not be one of metamorphic growth involving constant deaths and rebirths. Or at least not for everyone: Yeats’s capacity for psychological death and rebirth made him one of the most dramatic of poets, but the process of individuation might also be what Frye calls an unfolding. Rather than seeking originality and becoming something different, unfolding would be becoming a richer and more mature version of what you always have been. Frye himself seems to me an example of this, and on a smaller scale I suppose I might nominate myself. Everything I have felt, taught, and written is an “unfolded” version of what I was already revolving around at the age of 18. The price is a certain lack of “originality,” but we do not tire of sameness, so long as it is the right kind of sameness. We do not tire of eating; children do not tire of the same bedtime stories over and over. To repeat yourself, with variations, may imply a knowledge of what you really are, and an acceptance of it.
It may also, curiously enough, imply an acceptance of death. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud speculated about a “death drive” that is the opposite of the pleasure principle, the principle of life. The death drive seeks peace and stillness through the cessation of conflict and the dissolving into an “oceanic” unity. That stillness is achievable only in death: RIP. So the organism on a deep level is, as Keats said, half in love with easeful death. The task of the pleasure principle is to prolong the foreplay, so to speak, that delays the orgasmic dissolution, the consummation devoutly to be wished, as Hamlet said in his meditation on suicide. Striving is necessary to life, but compulsive, frantic striving may be an attempt to deny death, like a small child, cheeks flushed with exhaustion, whose hyperactivity is a resistance to going to bed. There is, however, a reason that cemeteries are always peaceful. As Dylan Thomas grew wise enough to say in one of his late poems, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” “After the first death, there is no other,” a line that can be read in at least three ways: after the first, physical death, there is no other death because we cease to exist; after the first death there is no other because we now reside in eternity; after the first death, there is no otherness, because we are, like the child, “robed in the long friends, the grains beyond age.” All three meanings are intended, and if we could hold them together in the mind they might bestow upon the exhausted, striving, resisting ego the peace of a stillness that passeth all understanding.
References
Frye, Northrop. The Modern Century. In Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, edited by Jan Gorak. Volume 11 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2003. 1-70. Originally published by Oxford University Press, 1967.
Frye, Northrop. “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism.” In Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature, edited by Glen Robert Gill. Volume 29 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2010. 54-73. Also in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. Harcourt Brace, 1963. 218-37.