For centuries philosophers like Gray have sought ways to make sense of the world and better understand our place in it—from the order of the cosmos to the nature of beauty to the chaos and brutality of war. And, for just as many centuries they have inspired, intrigued, and challenged us to consider new ideas, and offered perspectives on difficult issues to help us navigate our lives and set the course of civilizations.
As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Adams has helped oversee the rollout of an agency-wide initiative, Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War, which seeks to use the humanities to help Americans understand the experiences of service members as they return to civilian life.
]]>For centuries philosophers like Glenn Gray have sought ways to make sense of the world and better understand our place in it — from the order of the cosmos to the nature of beauty to the chaos and brutality of war. And, for just as many centuries they have inspired, intrigued, and challenged us to consider new ideas, and offered perspectives on difficult issues to help us navigate our lives and set the course of civilizations.
As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Adams has helped oversee the roll-out of an agency-wide initiative Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War which seeks to use the humanities to help Americans understand the experiences of service members as they return to civilian life.
National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William “Bro” Adams shares how philosophy professor and World War II veteran Glenn Gray and his book The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle helped him come to terms with his own experiences in Vietnam.
For centuries philosophers like Gray have sought ways to make sense of the world and better understand our place in it—from the order of the cosmos to the nature of beauty to the chaos and brutality of war. And, for just as many centuries they have inspired, intrigued, and challenged us to consider new ideas, and offered perspectives on difficult issues to help us navigate our lives and set the course of civilizations.
As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Adams has helped oversee the rollout of an agency-wide initiative, Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War, which seeks to use the humanities to help Americans understand the experiences of service members as they return to civilian life.
Here’s the code they used. It breaks the alphabet into five lines, each with five letters in it. So any letter (forget about K) can be conveyed through two sets of taps. A is 1, 1; Z is 5, 5 (K is either C or 2, 6). The code’s five lines are:
Captain John Borling was one of those captives, and the poems he composed as a P.O.W. were shared and memorized by his fellow prisoners. And, after Borling returned to the States after the war, his poems were pubished in Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton.
Borling’s poetry, composed in the most oppressive of conditions, demonstrates how the arts and humanities are essential to the human spirit and give evidence to the shared human impulse to make sense of our lives in words and through creative expression.
In the Hanoi Hilton, the place where the North Vietnamese imprisoned and often tortured American captives during the Vietnam War, the US prisoners used a tapping code to communicate with one another. But they didn’t just send conversational messages, they tapped out poetry, reciting from memory some of the favorites they remembered from school and composing new poems to lift their spirits. Their captors would not allow them to speak to one another. But they didn’t notice the tapping — or didn’t understand what it was about.
Here’s the code they used. It breaks the alphabet into five lines, each with five letters in it. So any letter (forget about K) can be conveyed through two sets of taps. A is 1, 1; Z is 5, 5 (K is either C or 2, 6). The code’s five lines are:
Captain John Borling was one of those captives, and the poems he composed as a P.O.W. were shared and memorized by his fellow prisoners. And, after Borling returned to the States after the war, his poems were pubished in Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton.
Borling’s poetry, composed in the most oppressive of conditions, demonstrates how the arts and humanities are essential to the human spirit and give evidence to the shared human impulse to make sense of our lives in words and through creative expression.