So I’m going with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” instead. Its lyricism conjures the innocence of youth that cannot imagine its own end. That’s kind of what innocence is: a brilliantly perfect inability to envision its own conclusion.
Thomas’s second stanza begins,
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
We are “young once only” and we play and are golden. We all see this in the delight of children and also in the mesmerizing natural panoramas that remind me of a summer evening on a hilltop in Maine. It’s summer vacation all the time. It evokes the feeling that I think that character from Friday Night Lights has in mind when he says, “My heart is full.”
In a way, the ending of “Fern Hill” brings me to what I love so much about Don Quixote and the scene I mentioned a minute ago. Here I am, a middle-aged guy spending every day with teenagers, hoping to share and discuss with them truths about the human condition and our relationships and tragedy and beauty while they, children who are “green and golden” in their “heedless ways,” in their Eden of hope and vigor, start to gain insight about how Time holds them. They are looking toward college and work and beyond, and often they worry and fear, and although for many the curiosity of youth is sputtering, its flame is not out.
Thomas:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that Time would take me
Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Whenever I read “Fern Hill,” and whenever I think of Don Quixote, I do so from the Experience side of the divide between innocence and experience. I peer longingly over at innocence, and I wish for it…and I feel it as if it were still here. It is the wonder of the poem, and of art, that in its presence we can be both green and dying.
]]>I could do several Humanities Hours out of Humanities Moments – there are so many passages and ideas that have animated my imagination. I first find myself drawn to the heart-wrenching climax of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, but to describe that would be to reveal the ending, which I would feel queasy doing.
So I’m going with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” instead. Its lyricism conjures the innocence of youth that cannot imagine its own end. That’s kind of what innocence is: a brilliantly perfect inability to envision its own conclusion.
Thomas’s second stanza begins,
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
We are “young once only” and we play and are golden. We all see this in the delight of children and also in the mesmerizing natural panoramas that remind me of a summer evening on a hilltop in Maine. It’s summer vacation all the time. It evokes the feeling that I think that character from Friday Night Lights has in mind when he says, “My heart is full.”
In a way, the ending of “Fern Hill” brings me to what I love so much about Don Quixote and the scene I mentioned a minute ago. Here I am, a middle-aged guy spending every day with teenagers, hoping to share and discuss with them truths about the human condition and our relationships and tragedy and beauty while they, children who are “green and golden” in their “heedless ways,” in their Eden of hope and vigor, start to gain insight about how Time holds them. They are looking toward college and work and beyond, and often they worry and fear, and although for many the curiosity of youth is sputtering, its flame is not out.
Thomas:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that Time would take me
Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Whenever I read “Fern Hill,” and whenever I think of Don Quixote, I do so from the Experience side of the divide between innocence and experience. I peer longingly over at innocence, and I wish for it…and I feel it as if it were still here. It is the wonder of the poem, and of art, that in its presence we can be both green and dying.
Years later, while a graduate student in Duke’s English department, a time during which she eventually came out as a lesbian, she explored the contents of the Intimate Bookshop in the next town over, Chapel Hill. A question in a book called Sappho Was a Right-On Woman transformed her worldview: “What causes heterosexuality?” By shifting the query from homosexuality to heterosexuality, the question was a “revelation” for Segrest.
By continuing to dwell on Faulkner’s novel, Segrest learned the value of perseverance: “Sometimes you just need to keep reading.” In grappling with the queries of a feminist text (“what causes heterosexuality?”), she realized that “how you ask the questions makes a really big difference.” Texts, arguments, and how people struggle with what it means to be human can be “liberatory or revelatory,” whether for a young girl in the midst of an apartheid system or for a lesbian woman in a homophobic society. Together, these humanities moments bookend Segrest’s personal and intellectual formation and her understanding of the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender.
]]>Growing up in the mid-1960s as a white girl in Tuskegee, Alabama, Mab Segrest attended a segregated private school that her parents had helped found in response to a court order years earlier to integrate public high schools. In the shadows of governor George Wallace’s racist violence, history had “come to [her] front door.” Seeking a better understanding of the U.S. South, she found William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in the local library. Perplexed by the interior monologue of its opening pages, she forged ahead in grappling with the famed Southern writer’s dizzying language. Around page 105, a revelation rewarded her persistence: she had been reading from the point of view of cognitively impaired Benjy, the “idiot.”
Years later, while a graduate student in Duke’s English department, a time during which she eventually came out as a lesbian, she explored the contents of the Intimate Bookshop in the next town over, Chapel Hill. A question in a book called Sappho Was a Right-On Woman transformed her worldview: “What causes heterosexuality?” By shifting the query from homosexuality to heterosexuality, the question was a “revelation” for Segrest.
By continuing to dwell on Faulkner’s novel, Segrest learned the value of perseverance: “Sometimes you just need to keep reading.” In grappling with the queries of a feminist text (“what causes heterosexuality?”), she realized that “how you ask the questions makes a really big difference.” Texts, arguments, and how people struggle with what it means to be human can be “liberatory or revelatory,” whether for a young girl in the midst of an apartheid system or for a lesbian woman in a homophobic society. Together, these humanities moments bookend Segrest’s personal and intellectual formation and her understanding of the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender.
This is Mab Segrest and this is my Humanities Moment. When asked to evoke this moment, I’m taken back to 1965, maybe, in Tuskegee, Alabama, where I’m a student at Macon Academy, a segregated private school that my parents had helped to start a couple years before, when the federal court put out an order in Macon County to integrate Tuskegee High School, where I attended, with three other high schools in cities across the state, and George Wallace sent state troopers on horses to close it down. And my parents helped to shape Macon Academy. And a couple years in, history had come to my front door. I would see the troopers two blocks down, and the media were on my doorstep, and then we would watch ourselves at night on TV, and it had really roiled a lot of reflections for me, as a white girl in a very segregated town, and what the South meant, what this all meant.
So, I went to the little library we had accumulated, that was in Harris Hotel next to the school, next to my house, and I decided I should read William Faulkner, because Faulkner supposedly wrote about the South. So, I picked out this book called The Sound And The Fury, which I had kind of heard of, too, and I started reading it. Now, if you’ve read The Sound And The Fury, you’ll know this. If you’ve not, I need to tell you that it’s done in a series of interior monologues with characters, and the first one is a character Benjy Compson, who is cognitively disabled—in the product of the times, an idiot—and the first hundred pages take place in his head.
Well, I would read the first 60 pages, and I would think, “What in the world is going on here? I’ve never—” And I would start again, and I would start again, and I was more perplexed, just about, than I ever have been with a literary text. And so finally I decided, “You just need to read it more.” And so I got to page 105 and realized, “Oh, wow. It’s Benjy! It’s not me!” This is somebody whose mental—you know, this is an idiot. Which is a derogatory term, but that’s what was I given to think of in the day. And I learned that sometimes you just need to keep reading. And certainly with my culture, I needed to do that, too.
I had a kind of equivalent moment later, 20 years later, when I came to Duke to graduate school. I came out as a lesbian. Well, I came to graduate school, and I had a lesbian relationship, but I wasn’t out as a lesbian, and I was really needing to understand it, in some way or another, so I didn’t go to the Gothic Bookshop at Duke, because people might see me. I went to the Intimate Bookstore in Chapel Hill. I got a book called Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, and I read through it, and there’s a list of three questions that you should ask yourself, and I only remember one. “What causes heterosexuality?” And that question was a revelation to me. Like, “Oh, it’s not what causes homosexuality. It’s what causes heterosexuality.”
I can ask the questions, and how you ask the questions makes a really big difference, so both of those are kind of bookends to how texts, arguments, people struggling with what it means to be human in particular cultural contexts, can be liberating and revelatory to either an adolescent in Alabama struggling with the apartheid system or later on, a woman who is a lesbian struggling with this intensely homophobic culture. And the larger literatures that have come out of African American scholars and women scholars, and queer scholars, on these questions of race/gender, have revolutionized, really, our understanding of the human, of what humanities are, and where we are positioned within them. So my humanities moment, then, is my encounter as a girl in Tuskegee with The Sound and The Fury.
Today, as a professor of literature, her conviction holds strong, supported by experiences such as teaching Melville’s Moby-Dick. She finds that contrary to present-day despair about their “slow attention spans,” students want to reach across centuries to worlds unfamiliar from their own.
]]>In 1979, at age 16, Hollis Robbins found herself enrolled at John Hopkins University. Though she was there as part of a program for girls who excelled in math, she signed up for a humanities lecture class. In that day’s class, drawing upon the epic of Gilgamesh, a guest lecturer expounded on the theory of “mimetic desire,” or the idea that we borrow our desires from other people. Unbeknownst to her, the speaker was none other than famed anthropological philosopher René Girard. Yet, Hollis disagreed. In her opinion, culled from reading stories such as those of Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, people actually like “very strange things.” They are drawn to things that are different from themselves.
Today, as a professor of literature, her conviction holds strong, supported by experiences such as teaching Melville’s Moby-Dick. She finds that contrary to present-day despair about their “slow attention spans,” students want to reach across centuries to worlds unfamiliar from their own.
I’m Hollis Robbins and the Delta Delta Delta fellow at the National Humanities Center, 2017–18. I was thinking about how I ended up as a scholar of the humanities and the origin would be in 1979. I had gone to college at age 16 under a math program for girls who were gifted at math. I found myself at Johns Hopkins very young and intending to study math and I signed up for a course in humanities, I think called just “Humanities” with the excellent Richard Maxey.
That fall he had a visiting scholar. I had no idea who it was: it was René Girard, who had just finished writing Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World, in which he set forth his theory of mimesis and mimetic desire. I remember walking into the seminar room one day, from fairly rural New Hampshire and for me books were just things that you read. I had no intention in studying literature in college and here comes this man with these—what I remember mostly is his humongous eyebrows—talking about the Gilgamesh epic and his theory of mimetic desire. That our desires do not emerge from us, but our desires emerge from imitating others’ desires, that we see somebody desiring something and that we begin to desire that. He went through the Epic of Gilgamesh to play out this theory.
At 16 years old sitting in this classroom, the seminar room listening to him, I thought he was wrong. I thought, now I don’t know anything but what I know from reading books, from reading Moby-Dick, from reading Dickens, from reading anything I could get my hands on, that people like very strange things. People are self-indulgent, self-defeating, there isn’t a character in anything written by Charles Dickens that I would want to mirror or desire. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in arguments about—or debates about, or sort of current discourse about—slow attention spans in our students. That our students can’t read whole novels. Can’t sit and digest an epic poem. Couldn’t converse for a two-and-a-half-hour seminar without their smart phone devices.
I think that this is, again, quite wrong. My experience in the classroom—let me just reach for Moby-Dick, which I teach every spring—is that students want something different. They want to reach across centuries. They want to reach across continents. They want not to have what they are familiar with spoon-fed to them. When they are given worlds, continents, thousands of individuals characters, situations, their desires will emerge from the experience of reading literature. I’ve had students in my office who want to talk about poor drowned Pip in Moby-Dick or who want to understand Queequeg’s great dive into the water to save a passenger that has just insulted him.
Literature frees young people from the constant barrage of familiarity that social media is giving them so I’m kind of pleased with myself, actually, at so long ago having my own opinion about René Girard.
It seems from my early consciousness, the humanities were an ever-present part of my being. The son of sharecropper's children, neither which possessed a high school education, they crafted a deeply humanistic perch from which I could view the world. From Durham and Salzburg, North Carolina, respectfully, the search for what Isabel Wilkerson has called the "light of the suns" resided in the conscious and unconscious recesses of their mind.
Possessing none of the benefits of class, race, and gender privilege, my mother harnessed the power of a book. A small library composed of encyclopedias, great books, contemporary literature and magazines, nestled in the study between the living room and master bedroom.
In the den, this middle space, where I did my homework daily, was where dreams were made and humanistic visions forged. It seems that all that would come was previewed there. A close reading of the Bible, deep droughts from the wells of encyclopedia Britannica, the great books and great performances, from Bach to Berlin.
My father cultivated in me his love of politics and sport. In the basement, he regaled us with Isaac Hayes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Whisperers on 8-track tapes. As we basked in the melodic cadences of the songs, Mohammed Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, James Foreman, or Tommy Hickman Herms, or Leonard Spinx could be seen on the console television, weaving their pugilistic magic in the ring.
If the basement and study, upper and lower rooms, represented two distinct poles of reality, then the kitchen served as the temple to politics. There my father read the newspaper and watched the nightly news. It was his insistence that politics mattered, which fueled my subsequent interest in political conventions. I watched my first political convention in 1976, and I continue to do so up to the present day.
Convinced that being humanistic entailed civic engagement, my parents always took my brother and I with them to vote in local, state and national elections. It was a ritual of sorts. We obligingly piled into our old 1968 Pontiac Bonneville, arriving at Campville Elementary School, our neighborhood polling place in Baltimore County, Maryland. Once there, they would park the car on the road, and we would watch them make their way through a gauntlet of poll workers, who showered them with campaign literature of one sort or another. Undaunted, they proceeded into the polling place, and stayed for what seemed an eternity. Emerging together as if they had crossed the finish line of a marathon, we could see the exhilaration and the importance of this act.
It was a logical extension of the humanistic constructs in our home. Contact in eventful and uneventful ways, my upbringing among organic intellectuals, a Gramscian designation would surely apply to my parents, shaped my interests in direct and indirect ways.
By the mid-80s, armed with a deeper and more informed sense of my racial sense and my humanistic responsibility, I too became involved in political campaign. As election day approached, we received our poll assignments. My assignment was none other than Campville Elementary School. I arrived early to my post on election day. A lean, lanky boy of 17, I was wise in the arts of politics, canvassing and poll work. The voters came slowly, and then steadily, through the gauntlet of poll workers who handed them literature, and generally cajoled and prodded them to vote for one candidate or the other. All the faces seemed to blur, until I looked across the yard and saw my parents, parking in their familiar place and proceeding to the gauntlet. As my parents proceeded, I felt the weight of the years passing before me, remembering my passive position watching my parents, and present one as an active participant. Now, in our reverse roles, all was clear. As they approached, I beamed with pride. I hugged them, and gleefully announced and introduced them to the assembled throng as my parents.
I knew in that moment all the years of watching, listening, engaging, thinking in our den and basement and kitchen had prepared me for this moment. A moment electric with the preparation of the past, the participatory urgency of the present, and the humanistic possibilities of the future.
Later, he describes how the portraits painted by Rembrandt and photographs taken by Richard Avedon help us notice and better appreciate the humanity of the people around us and to perceive hints of their inner lives.
]]>From reading Crime and Punishment as a high school senior and the Depression-era masterpieces Absalom, Absolom! and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in college, Gil Greggs describes a personal journey of discovery about the ways literature connects readers to the real world.
Later, he describes how the portraits painted by Rembrandt and photographs taken by Richard Avedon help us notice and better appreciate the humanity of the people around us and to perceive hints of their inner lives.
Already an accomplished political historian at the time of this moment, Leuchtenburg demonstrates how the questions and ways of seeing in other humanities fields led him to analogous realizations about his own research.
]]>In this account, William Leuchtenburg shares the story of a seemingly routine exchange with literary scholars in the late 1970s which spurred him to new insights about the ways iconic figures from the past influence those who succeed them, whether they be poets, or composers, or U.S. presidents. Eventually, he would share these insights in his major work on presidential legacies, In The Shadow of FDR.
Already an accomplished political historian at the time of this moment, Leuchtenburg demonstrates how the questions and ways of seeing in other humanities fields led him to analogous realizations about his own research.
Across generations, cultural divides, venues, and artistic voices, the power of lyric poetry to capture and convey powerful feeling is undeniable. And when poetry is performed and embodied, “brought to life” if you will, its capacity to create change is palpable.
]]>Thomas Scherer describes two related encounters which speak to the power of hearing poetry performed aloud. The first is an explanatory talk and poetry reading by the great literary scholar M. H. Abrams at the National Humanities Center; the second is hearing Lin-Manuel Miranda discuss his award-winning rap musical, Hamilton.
Across generations, cultural divides, venues, and artistic voices, the power of lyric poetry to capture and convey powerful feeling is undeniable. And when poetry is performed and embodied, “brought to life” if you will, its capacity to create change is palpable.
A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.
Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!
During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Willa Cather’s evocative novels My Antonia and O Pioneers!
I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in How Green Was My Valley, Walter Hampton in The Patriots and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.
A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and King Lear—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.
The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.
Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!
Did he appear because I fell asleep thinking of him? If only I’d known I was dreaming, I’d never have wakened. |
I thought to pick the flower of forgetting for myself, but I found it already growing in his heart. |
Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s Apology and Phaedo? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.
These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the Enchiridion of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his Meditations advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.
As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s Messiah was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.
Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:
Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.
How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!
]]>Some years ago, I was asked to give a lecture to students enrolled in a small university’s humanities program describing the personal epiphany I experienced which led to my passion for the humanities. Try as I might, I could not think of an isolated, single experience but rather a series of moments that stretch back to my childhood and have “stuck to my ribs” over a lifetime.
A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.
Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!
During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Willa Cather’s evocative novels My Antonia and O Pioneers!
I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in How Green Was My Valley, Walter Hampton in The Patriots and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.
A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and King Lear—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.
The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.
Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!
Did he appear because I fell asleep thinking of him? If only I’d known I was dreaming, I’d never have wakened. |
I thought to pick the flower of forgetting for myself, but I found it already growing in his heart. |
Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s Apology and Phaedo? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.
These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the Enchiridion of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his Meditations advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.
As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s Messiah was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.
Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:
Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.
How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
]]>Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California, reflects on her life growing up in New Mexico and how a low grade on a poetry analysis assignment in college encouraged her to master the craft of writing. She notes how her writing abilities and exposure to the humanities served her well in a career in government and higher education.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
Clifton had been named a distinguished professor of the arts and because she didn’t have all of the right credentials a man in the office next to hers didn’t think she deserved the honor and took time out of his day to tell her so. The poem is her response. The whole of that moment was affirming, not just the poem but the reason it came to me. More than affirming me, it showed me how to live this life of the mind—to do the work with fierce joy and to invite students, colleagues, and my communities to celebrate it with me.
The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.
Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.
]]>The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.
Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.
Hearing Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me” at a celebration of her work is the Humanities Moment that offered both comfort and a model for how to navigate life as a Black academic. I was a new English professor and was unprepared for the isolation I felt in the academy when a senior colleague invited me to the Clifton event. The evening was packed with more dazzling poets than I can remember, and I really couldn’t take it in. I still don’t remember much about it except hearing this poem and the story behind it.
Clifton had been named a distinguished professor of the arts and because she didn’t have all of the right credentials a man in the office next to hers didn’t think she deserved the honor and took time out of his day to tell her so. The poem is her response. The whole of that moment was affirming, not just the poem but the reason it came to me. More than affirming me, it showed me how to live this life of the mind—to do the work with fierce joy and to invite students, colleagues, and my communities to celebrate it with me.
The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.
Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.