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Virginia Woolf
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National Humanities Center Board Members
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This collection includes contributions from the distinguished board of trustees of the National Humanities Center
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A Lifetime of Humanities Moments
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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 <em>The Deerslayer</em> and <em>The Last of the Mohicans</em>, Alexander Dumas’ <em>The Three Musketeers</em> and Jules Verne’s <em>The Mysterious Island</em> were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s <em>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</em>, <em>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court</em> and <em>Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc</em> and Willa Cather’s evocative novels <em>My Antonia</em> and <em>O Pioneers!</em></p>
<p>I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in <em>How Green Was My Valley</em>, Walter Hampton in <em>The Patriots</em> and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, <em>Cyrano de Bergerac</em>. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s <em>Anthony and Cleopatra</em> and George Bernard Shaw’s <em>Caesar and Cleopatra</em>. 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.</p>
<p>A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—<em>Henry V</em>, <em>Macbeth</em>, <em>Hamlet</em>, <em>Merchant of Venice</em>, <em>Midsummer Night’s Dream</em>, <em>Othello</em> and <em>King Lear</em>—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 <em>The Visit</em>—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!!</p>
<ul>
<li>Who can forget Hector’s farewell to his infant son in the <em>Iliad</em>?</li>
<li>Or be struck by George Elliott observing in <em>Middlemarch</em>, “No age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.” Or, “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our mortality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”</li>
<li>Who can forget Huck Finn introducing himself on the opening page of the eponymous novel and then later wrestling with his conscience and eschatology whether to report Jim as a runaway slave?</li>
<li>Of a different nature but just as memorable are the exquisite and subtle emotions experienced and described by Virginia Wolff in <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em> and <em>To the Lighthouse</em>.</li>
<li>And, most recently for me, the moment in Proust’s last volume, <em>Le Temps Retrouvé of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</em> where he describes his epiphany that enables him to be a writer and thus realize his literary ambitions.</li>
<li>Finally, mention must be made of poignant moments so touching to me in Japanese literary gems. To read Shikibu Murasaki’s masterpiece <em>Genji Monogatari</em> is to be transported to another time (11th century), another world (medieval Japan) and sensibilities to be treasured. Love poems two centuries earlier capture the mood and the feeling. Consider these two gems by Ono no Komachi:<br />
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border-bottom: none;"><em>Did he appear<br />because I fell asleep<br />thinking of him?<br />If only I’d known I was dreaming,<br />I’d never have wakened.</em></td>
<td style="border-bottom: none;"><em>I thought to pick<br />the flower of forgetting<br />for myself,<br />but I found it<br />already growing in his heart.</em></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s <em>Apology</em> and <em>Phaedo</em>? 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Enchiridion</em> of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his <em>Meditations</em> 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Messiah</em> 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.</p>
<p>Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cherobino’s incomparable profession of adolescent love “Non so pia cosa son” and the Contessa’s “Dove sono I bei momenti” lamenting her lost love—both from Mozart’s <em>Le Nozze di Figaro</em></li>
<li>Wotan’s “Farewell” bringing to a close <em>Die Valkyrie</em>, the second opera of Wagner’s <em>Der Ring des Nibelungen</em></li>
<li>Hans Sachs “Wahn, wahn” monologue from this same composer’s <em>Die Meistersinger</em></li>
<li>Iago’s great aria “Credo in un Dio crudel” from the second act of Verdi’s <em>Otello</em></li>
<li>Schaunard, the philosopher, bidding farewell to his cloak in order to purchase medicines for the dying Mimi in Puccini’s <em>La Bohème</em></li>
<li>The transcendent trio sung by the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie in the last act of Richard Strauss’s <em>Der Rosenkavalier</em>.</li>
</ul>
<p>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.</p>
<p>How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!</p>
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Peter A. Benoliel, Chairman Emeritus, Quaker Chemical Corporation
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benoliel-lifetime-humanities-moments
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Antony and Cleopatra
Aurelius, Marcus
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Books & Reading
Business Leaders
Caesar and Cleopatra
Cather, Willa
Classical Music
Cooper, James Fenimore
Corelli, Arcangelo
Cyrano de Bergerac
Dickens, Charles
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Drama
Dumas, Alexandre
Dürrenmatt, Freidrich
Eliot, George
Epictetus
Film
Goya, Francisco
Handel, George Frideric
Hesse, Herman
Homer, Virgil
Horace, Catullus
How Green Was My Valley
In Search of Lost Time
Literature
Melville, Herman
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life
Modern Painting
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mrs. Dalloway
Murasaki, Shikibu
My Ántonia
O Pioneers!
Performing Arts
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte
Philosophy
Piano Concerto no. 5
Plato
Poetry
Proust, Marcel
Schubert, Franz Peter
Shakespeare, William
Shaw, George Bernard
Socrates
Symphony no. 8 in B Minor
Telemann, Georg Philipp
Thackeray, William Makepeace
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Deerslayer, or the First War-path
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757
The Mysterious Island
The Patriots
The Tale of Genji
The Three Musketeers
The Visit
To the Lighthouse
Tolstoy, Leo
Twain, Mark
Verne, Jules
Vivaldi, Antonio Lucio
Woolf, Virginia
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Socrates
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National Humanities Center Fellows
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Any contributions from current or past fellows at the National Humanities Center
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<p>As a humanist, you collect a lot of Humanities Moments, but the one I wanted to tell you about is one that’s burned vividly into my mind. And it’s one that’s especially formative, perhaps it’s responsible for the fact that I’m a philosophy professor today.</p>
<p>It happened in my first semester of philosophy class in college. It was Dr. Muller’s class, freshman year, first time I’d ever studied philosophy, and one of the first texts we read was Plato’s dialogue, <em>Euthyphro</em>. In this dialogue, Socrates is heading into court where he’s going to be tried for his life. He meets an acquaintance of his named Euthyphro, and Euthyphro is there because he’s prosecuting his father for murder, which is of course shocking for the ancient Greeks. The idea of a son prosecuting a father is impious. It’s completely contrary to the respect owed to parents. But Euthyphro professes that he has a higher responsibility, and he tells Socrates that it’s actually pious to prosecute murderers, whether they’re your parents or not.</p>
<p>Socrates is intrigued by this, and he asks Euthyphro to explain to him what piety is. This is always the catch in a Socratic dialogue—the moment when Socrates gets interested. Euthyphro answers pretty quickly, “Piety is doing as I am doing. That is to say, prosecuting anyone who is guilty of murder, sacrilege, or any similar crime whether he be your father or mother or whoever he may be.” And here comes the moment that absolutely stunned me as an 18-year-old. Socrates responds, “Wait a minute, Euthyphro. You just gave me an example of a pious <em>deed</em>, and that doesn’t help me know what piety is. I want you to explain what fundamentally makes this and all other pious deeds <em>be</em> pious. What do they all have in common?”</p>
<p>This was like a revelation. I’d been going through my entire life using these concepts like justice or piety or beauty or goodness or harm to talk about things. We talk about an unjust pay scale or an unjust law or a beautiful painting or a good course of action. We say, “Don’t do that because it’s harmful.” It never once occurred to me that you could ask about the concepts themselves. It’s like I’d been using these word tools all my life and I never asked where they came from or how they worked or whether they were the right tools for the particular job at hand.</p>
<p>This was just an absolutely life-changing moment. There was this whole new layer of reality opening up that I hadn’t even known was there, a whole new set of things to think about. It really was just exactly this Plato’s Cave moment where you’re watching the shadows on the wall and suddenly you get turned around and you see the puppets and you say, “Oh my goodness, the shadows are the effects of something else that’s been behind me out of sight the whole time and now I can see them!” It just completely changed the way I think about life and how I approach having discussions with people. I mean, there’s no point arguing about whether a new rule is fair or not if you haven’t stopped to investigate first if you’re even both using the same concept of fairness. This attention to the level of the concept is just crucial to living together well as human beings, and this was just my first glimpse of it. There’s so much that’s transformative in this dialogue. I always teach it now to my first-year students.</p>
<p>I also wanted to mention this interesting twist at the end of the dialogue that I think is so important for the humanities. Euthyphro gets impatient with the discussion and he’s embarrassed that his off-the-cuff answers keep falling apart under Socrates’s questioning, and so there’s a sad moment at the end of the dialogue where he cuts Socrates off and says, “We're just going to have to have this discussion another time, Socrates, because I’m in a hurry now and I have to go.” Plato just ends the dialogue on this tragic note, because as the reader, you know that Socrates himself is going to be condemned to death on charges of another kind of impiety—for not believing in the Greek gods—in the very next dialogue, and what Plato is telling us is that this impatience with philosophical reflection can be deadly. The most intelligent people in ancient Greek society are going around using concepts like justice and piety without caring enough to really put the time and effort into thinking those concepts all the way through. People die on account of that shoddy use of concepts.</p>
<p>The tragic ending really stayed with me ever since. We want the quick answer, the quick solution. We get impatient with the slow thinking before we can really experience the results, but if we really want to reap the fruits of the humanities, we have to cherish the slow thinking and make time for that patient, enduring, contemplative, questioning look at reality.</p>
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Set On a Path by Socrates
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As a college freshman, Thérèse Cory encountered Plato’s Socratic dialogue <em>Euthyphro</em> for the first time. Reading Socrates’ exhortations for Euthyphro—a man bringing charges of murder against his father—to articulate a clear and universal definition of piety, Cory realized the extent to which many of us take key terms and ideas for granted. The story ignited her belief that we must discuss and understand one another’s conceptual perspectives in order to live harmoniously together. This intellectual commitment set Cory on her path to become a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
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set-on-a-path-by-socrates
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<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/therese-scarpelli-cory/">Thérèse Cory</a>, associate professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University
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Euthyphro
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Plato
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