Shift To Public Life
In 1944 he was appointed to the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission. In 1948 Williams returned to Trinidad as the Commission's Deputy Chairman of the Caribbean Research Council. In Trinidad, Williams delivered a series of educational lectures for which he became famous. In 1955 after disagreements between Williams and the Commission, the Commission elected not to renew his contract. In a famous speech at Woodford Square in Port of Spain, he declared that he had decided to "put down his bucket" in the land of his birth. He rechristened that enclosed park, which stood in front of the Trinidad courts and legislature, "The University of Woodford Square", and proceeded to give a series of public lectures on world history, Greek democracy and philosophy, the history of slavery, and the history of the Caribbean to large audiences drawn from every social class.
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Famous quotes containing the words shift to, shift, public and/or life:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“I will use the world and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth. The city becomes an emblem in remote minds; apart from the tangible export of goods and men, it exerts its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases.”
—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough.... He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)