of the word, we are in serious danger of going completely crazy. That was the original idea
 of Sunday. The useless day, the day that was time out, the day when you weren't supposed
 to do anything serious. It was holiday, holy day. But instead, Sunday has been perverted.
 And instead of being really time out, it becomes time instead for recreation, so that you'll
 go back stronger Monday morning, and for laying it on thick in the way of rationality and
 lectures on the good life. So you see there's a little paradox here. It is absolutely necessary
 for our sanity that we should play, and that we should be useless and be preoccupied with
 useless things from time to time. But we don't do it if we do it because it's good for us.
 So in the mood of play, one has to get one's mind completely away from the future and the
 purposes of the future, and get into what I would call a musical mood. Because music
 is supremely playful, in that it doesn't strive for goals. It fulfills itself at every
 moment of its unfolding, even though it has a design, it has patterns, it has movements
 as with a symphony, it has progressions as with the working out of the pattern of a fugue.
 But always the point of music is to be with it as it unfolds, because if you aren't, you
 miss the melody, you don't hear it at all. And so then, I would look upon this world
 as a musical phenomenon, as a game, which is a kind of sublime nonsense, just as when
 Bach writes a line of melody. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't tell you anything,
 it doesn't try to imitate the thundering of horses' hooves, or the sound of screams,
 or factory whistles, and the uprising of the workers, or anything like that. It has no
 social message. It's pure playing with sound, and for this reason, among others, sublime.
 So then, it would appear that our whole cosmos is a colossal effusion of splendid nonsense.
 And you can see every form of life, insects, rabbits, giraffes, elephants, people, bees,
 flowers, everything, as different kinds of music, in the same way as you get waltzes,
 mazurkas, charlstons, swing, every kind of musical form or dance form. So in the way
 those dances differ, so in the same way all species of life differ. They are different
 tunes, different dances. And the importance of them is not to get somewhere, because the
 only place you can get, if you're going to go somewhere in time, is a kind of a reproductive
 vicious circle. We live to have children, who all get put in boxes and come out just
 the same, and they're going to put their children in boxes, and so on and so on and so on. Well,
 we are just nothing but a lot of tubes, a swallowing food which goes in at one end and
 out the other, and that wears the tube out. And then, but the whole thing is to keep it
 going by manufacturing new tubes by reproduction, and they'll do the same thing, and so on
 and so on. But so long, you see, as they're all thinking that the point of doing this
 is that sometime, somehow, something's going to turn up. They'll always miss the point.
 They will always be there rather than here. It's very funny to come to California, you
 know, when you've lived elsewhere, and it's been an ideal, and suddenly you wake up and
 you realize you're there. You know, you're on vacation. You've got there. And everybody
 else envies you. And so we have to learn how to be there, or rather to be here. Of course,
 it is always possible to construe the thing in another way, and to say, yes, it may be
 a game, but it's a ghastly game, it's a grim game. It's like a child who's caught a fly
 alive and is picking the wings off it. The universe is that sort of scheme. It's a trap.
 It's a thing that gives you hope. It's always dangling possibilities in front of you, to
 keep you going, but then it grinds you up. And then it revives you a little, like a master
 torturer keeping a person alive in order to experience pain. There is a kind of inverted
 mystical experience that people occasionally have, where they see the whole universe as
 this sort of trap. And everything looks crummy. People look as if they're made of plastic,
 and aren't really people, but only make-believe people. They're mechanisms, which are going
 yakety-yak and pretending that they are really there and alive. And everything looks as if
 it were made of patent leather or enameled tin, and just a nasty, dead scene. That's
 the inverted mystical experience. And one might ask, "Well, you could take that view
 too." And here you come to what Albert Camus said. The fundamentally important philosophical
 question is whether or not to commit suicide. Now, this is the real question. Is the game
 worth the candle? If you think no, then you better commit suicide. That's the logical
 thing to do. If, on the other hand, you're not sure, then you better make up your mind.
 Because if you're going to go on with the game of life, and not be sure as to whether
 it's really worth going on, you'll make a mess of it. That's quite certain. It's like
 doing something evil, like telling a lie. If you're going to tell a lie at all, you
 have to make it stick. And so make it good. Don't wobble when you lie, because someone
 will find you out, and it'll all fall apart, and it'll be worse than if you never did it.
 So if you make up your mind that you're going to do something evil, you have to have
 like a golf swing follow-through. And so in the same way with going on living at all,
 if you're going to gamble, gamble. And so either suicide or gamble seem to me to be
 the great alternatives of this life. And what will the gamble be? The gamble, or the gaming,
 has to rest on the assumption that this game is superb. No other assumption will work.
 If I may put it in another way, the game is to be trusted. The universe, you yourself,
 it is fundamentally to be trusted. And this is the act of faith which underlies all gambling.
 Because if you don't make that assumption, as absolutely basic, the game will not work.
 Now this is where one must consider game theory in relation to ethics. What are the characteristics
 of a workable game? A viable game, as biologists would call it. A game that is worth the candle.
 First of all, the game must involve an optimal combination of skill and chance, or we might
 say order and randomness. Where a game is pure chance, it loses interest. Let's just
 think of tossing coins.


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