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"A Shared Poem",,"I discovered the poetry of William Blake on a bookshelf in San Francisco. Set beside the works of Charles Baudelaire, and other books I’ve long forgotten, Blake’s poems had rested on the shelf in my grandparents’ home for years. I was unfamiliar with Blake’s work at the time, but, during a visit in high school, I took his poetry from the shelf for some late-night reading. I flipped through the pages of Blake’s work without expectations, and I soon found what became my favorite poem, “The Human Abstract.”
I read through the poem countless times that night, and I found myself thinking about it still the next morning. By the time I returned home from my visit, I was eager to memorize the poem. I told my parents that I wanted to read more of William Blake’s work, and my father seemed somewhat surprised. His surprise wasn’t due to my interest in poetry, but rather in this particular poet. I explained that I’d recently discovered my new favorite poem, and launched into an explanation of what I’d read. My father quickly replied that “The Human Abstract” was his favorite poem, and it had been his favorite poem for many years.
I had unintentionally discovered my father’s copy of William Blake’s work, left in his parents’ home in his old childhood room. I never knew that he had read Blake’s poetry when he was younger, nor did I know that he’d taken a college course focused on William Blake. As it turned out, my brother’s name, William had even been chosen with William Blake in mind. These connections astounded me. My father and I don’t typically enjoy the same literature, and we’d never discussed poetry before that conversation. However, my coincidental discovery of the Human Abstract revealed our connection across generations. We shared the same fascination with the poem, and we found ourselves diving into a discussion of our thoughts on Blake and poetry. “The Human Abstract” has become an enduring topic of conversation for my father and I, and I’m grateful to have stumbled upon this poem on a night when I couldn’t sleep.
",,"""The Human Abstract"" by William Blake",,2008/2009,"Carolyn A. Levy, 28, PhD Candidate, Penn State University",,,,,,shared-poem,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Winter Residency 2020","Blake, William,Books & Reading,Family,Fathers & Daughters,Poetry",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/415/Blake_Poem_HM.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0
"Coming Into My Feminist Consciousness",,"My Humanities Moment occurred during my Junior year in college, when I attended an evening session with Gerda Lerner, the author of The Creation of Feminist Consciousness and one of the founders of the academic field called women’s history.
I read only short sections of the book assigned in my women’s studies class. (The course itself was a revelation to me, and a requirement because I didn’t score a 5 on my high school AP History exam. Being forced to take history courses in college was the bright side of this failure, because it was in those classes that I learned that history is more than the dates of battles, treaties, and founding documents -- all activities of men. I realized that women were doing cool (and important) things while all that other business was going on.)
I remember almost nothing about the event except a single line by the speaker, which I can only approximate here. Dr. Lerner said that the tragedy of women’s history is the sheer waste of intellectual capital for millenia. She asked us to consider what our culture might have lost -- what all the world’s cultures have lost -- due to women’s subjugation and their lack of access to education. How many books were never written? How many works of art never made? How many ideas in philosophy and politics and religion and science were never engendered because of one gender’s systematic oppression?
I remember sobbing in my chair. I remember the choking anger I felt at this injustice. I also remember the feeling I finally had an answer to a question my father had once posed.
Now, you have to understand a bit about me to understand this moment, my coming to feminist consciousness. I was the only girl in a family of three boys. I was the daughter of a man who could have given the Great Santini a run for his money. Our household was run with military precision, my father being a retired Army officer, Vietnam veteran, helicopter pilot, and Ranger instructor, and my mother a traditional, mild-mannered wife. Our house was patriarchal, to be sure, and I did my best to measure up to a standard that placed male bodies and minds above all else. (My father, in fact, once told me that I was the “best son he ever had,” a true compliment coming from him.)
I understand now that my father was a product of his time, born in 1931 and raised in Tennessee, but as a young girl I received mixed messages about my place. He appreciated my intellect and we often spent evenings together watching Masterpiece Theater or some other PBS documentary that would be “wasted” on my brothers. During one of these evenings, my father asked me, “Why do you suppose there are no women composers?”
I cannot remember the exact tone of his question; he could very well have been taunting me, reinforcing the idea that women were inferior because, look, there’s the proof. There are no women composers. They must be bad at composing. Taunting me was one of my father’s unfortunate habits. But I like to think my father’s tone also included some confusion and curiosity. Here he was with this brainy daughter -- who was, in his words, “smarter than all three boys put together” -- but where could she really succeed if there were no women composers?
I certainly don’t recall my answer to my father’s question, but I do remember the roiling of my brain and the shame I felt at not having a good explanation for why there were no women composers, few women authors, no women presidents, and certainly no female helicopter pilots. I remember the queasy sense of defeat that whatever my intellect, I couldn’t amount to much -- or at least not to the level of men. And I wanted to be a good man -- the best son -- for my terrifying, mercurial father.
Gerda Lerner’s words gave me the answer I needed. There were no women composers because, according to Lerner, patriarchy had “skewed the intellectual development of women as a group, since their major intellectual endeavor had to be to counteract the pervasive patriarchal assumptions of their inferiority and incompleteness as human beings.”
That’s exactly what I had been doing in my family for 20-something years, trying to counteract the idea that I was inferior.
I never got to explain all this to my father, partly because I was too afraid, partly because I hadn’t worked it all out in a bell ringer, iron-clad speech that would once and for all convince him of women’s equality, and partly because he died soon after I graduated. But Gerda Lerner’s words have never left me, and they’ve helped me understand how the humanities -- the intellectual endeavors of both women and men -- can and do nurture the mind and the soul.",,"The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by Gerda Lerner",,1993-1994,"C. N. Bernstein",,,,,,coming-into-my-feminist-consciousness,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Andy Mink","College Students,Fathers & Daughters,Feminism,Feminist Authors,Lerner, Gerda,Self-Realization,The History of Feminist Consciousness,Women's and Gender Studies,Women's History,Women's Rights",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/9/350/Feminist_Pin_Image_HM.jpg,Text,"Teacher Advisory Council",1,0
"The Fault in Our Stars and my Dad - Living through Leukemia in my Dad's shoes",,"Between the years of 2012-2014, the book The Fault in Our Stars written by John Green was one of the most popular books and films for teenagers. The book was such a hit Hollywood decided to make it a film, and they did a great job sticking to the original novel.
This novel is about two teenagers named Hazel and Augustus going through cancer and struggling to get through it until they meet each other through a support group, consisting of many other young cancer patients. My humanities moment happened in 2014 when my friend introduced to me this book. This included staying up all night, each night until I had finished reading the book so I could watch the film. At the age of 19, my dad had stage 4 Leukemia. This book always leaves me feeling emotional as it makes me think of my dad and all the battles he had to go through. Cancer is the hardest battle to fight and I’m so grateful that my dad, even though he was so close to death, continued fighting to survive. Without my dad, me or my siblings would not be here today. This novel is similar to my dad’s story because like the teenagers in the novel, they were fighting for their lives each day and going through lots of chemo and battling depression.
To read the novel and watch the film gave me a better understanding of what my dad’s life looked like from his shoes, living his everyday life being once a cancer patient. It was laying in a hospital bed all day, eating the same foods, being sick and exhausted all the time, and taking so many medications that didn’t seem to help. It made my dad feeling depressed because he couldn’t do much from being so sick, similar to the character Hazel and her story. When my dad got sick, he lost his friends because they thought they can no longer hang around him or weren’t wanting to support him. The character Hazel had similar troubles like my dad and was always sad and alone, rereading the same book and watching the same tv shows, that is until she met Augustus from the support group that she was forced to go to because of her parents.
If there is one gift I could give to my dad in the past, it would be to watch this film (not the story because he doesn’t like to read). I think watching this film would have gave my dad hope to know that he isn’t the only one fighting cancer and the characters Hazel and Augustus as well as millions of other teenagers in the world understand what he is going through.",https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ffrNqDDyEgLPHj5IMLH6OMcedcAki7mNHeRVFKKol10/edit?usp=sharing,"The book The Fault in Our Stars by John Green",,"The year 2014 in my living room reading the book / watching the movie.","Cheyenne, 18 years old, living in Utah, a senior in high school",,,,,,the-fault-in-our-stars,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"12th grade English Teacher, Mrs. Layton!","Books & Reading,Bountiful, Utah,Cancer,Empathy,Fathers & Daughters,Film Adaptations,Green, John,Illness,Students,The Fault in Our Stars,Young Adult Literature",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/284/5886223907_9b8e22c9c4_o.jpg,Text,,1,0
"Things Usually Turn Out Alright",,"
Esther Mackintosh explains how a single letter from her father offered solace during an especially trying period of her life.
As a graduate student facing an uncertain future, Mackintosh took refuge in her father’s written words, which described his own challenges as a newly married farmer during the Great Depression. His letter concluded with a question posed to his daughter: “Would it help you to know that things usually turn out alright?” Thanks to her father’s words, Mackintosh, herself a scholar of stories, could contextualize her own unfolding narrative in light of her family history.
",,,,,"Esther Mackintosh, President of the Federation of State Humanities Councils",,,,,,esther-mackintosh-things-turn-out-alright,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Family,Family Histories,Fathers & Daughters,Graduate Students,Great Depression (1929-1939),Letter-Writing,Letters,Storytelling,Vocation",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/94/farm-in-winter-960.jpg,"Moving Image",,1,0