Time for Beauty

There are hungers other than the hungers of the body. Each traveler at the gate needs more than bread and meat, more than wine and shelter from the storm. For we are complex in our simplicity.

Not bread alone we ask, but nourishment of a subtler kind. A child knows and invents his own legends, contribes his own poetry. Homer knew, Homer with his wine, dark sea, and rosy finger dawn. Dante inventing a world out of a woman's eyes, Raphael and the unwanted Leonardo.

They tove and death, but pouring out his music, lest his brain should burst with too much beauty, and Milton blind, but seeing with an awful vision. They knew about it all. And he is rich who wins their legacy.

He is wise who seeks them out to claim his own. This is every man's journey, and the moment to set out is now, for it is always later than you think, and now the time for beauty.

The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation presents Time for Beauty, the eleventh in a series of programs on the changes that have lately come to the American South. This week we would like to discuss the resurgence of cultural interest, a revival in literature, music, and the theatre.

In order to trace this new world renaissance, NBC assigned Henry Cassidy to travel the roads of the south, to seek out these things and tell us what he saw. Here with his eleventh report is Mr. Cassidy.

It's not an easy thing to go searching after culture in a land that is not your own. For art and beauty are subtle things and they do not willingly reveal themselves to the transient or the passerby.