Muted Gaudeamus

A scientist last week dispelled fears that a new Ice Age is about to engulf the world. Some climatologists had predicted that the Arctic pack ice would some day unfreeze. However,after examining sediment thought to be 4,000,000 years old at latitude 80DEG N., longitude 158DEGW., the University of Wisconsin's David Clark confidently predicted that no pack ice will chill Key Biscayne very soon. It was one of the few pieces of unequivocally good news heard lately, and it recalled Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, which described man's survival amid a new Ice Age and other trials.

Today, facing furies unimagined and unimaginable in Wilder's heyday, most people cannot share Wilder's optimism. In the 1960s the U.S. has admittedly been spared depressions, cataclysm, poxes, civil war and nuclear devastation--not to mention prevalent permafrost. Alas, few other prophets can speak with the certitude of geologists promising an unfrozen future--as this or any week's news suggests. The Administration claims that Moscow may soon have the capability to devastate the U.S. with a formidable new battery of nuclear missiles. Yet any attempt to counter the Soviet threat (if it is real) would divert scarce funds from urgently needed domestic programs. Of course, the argument goes, social ills may speedily be cured as soon as the Viet Nam war is ended. But when will that be?

Knock on Wood. As if bent on self-destruction, man has made his water and air poisonous. Highways, airways and commuter railways have become choked to the suffocation point. The problems of the present may be deferrable, those of the future soluble. But by whom? Americans have traditionally sacrificed to educate their young and believed in the next generation's competence to settle a troubled world. Today that assumption is widely questioned. Education in its Latin origin means to bring up, but on American campuses recently, extremists have often made the process seem more like a bringing down, a reduction to absurdity of the meaning and intent of learning. Is there then any rational basis for optimism? It is arguable. Perhaps, reason and prophecy to the contrary, man must rely on the instinctive hope, the muted gaudeamus, expressed by the maid Lily Sabina in Wilder's play:

"We've managed to survive for some time now, catch as catch can, the fat and the lean, and if the dinosaurs don't trample us to death, and if the grasshoppers don't eat up our garden, we'll all live to see better days, knock on wood."

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