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"“Il faut le savoir:” Reflecting on France’s Holocaust History and Memory",,"“Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse,” writes Jean Cayrol in the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ iconic filmic meditation on the Shoah, Night and Fog (1956). “Inside, a fake shower room welcomed newcomers. The doors were closed. The newcomers were observed. The only sign – but you must know this (il faut le savoir) – is the ceiling worked over by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” At this point in the film, like an insistent investigative eye, the camera pans to the ceiling of the gas chamber, revealing the telltale scratch marks. The image of fingernails clawing into concrete in a desperate attempt for survival recurs in another work about Holocaust memory that we read this semester, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Recalling an exhibit he had visited with his aunt shortly after the war – the same one, in fact, that led producers to ask Alain Resnais to create the film that would become Night and Fog -- the child survivor narrator writes: “I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens, lacerated by the fingernails of those who had been gassed.”
Il faut le savoir. The phrase has haunted me throughout the semester. You must know this. Because it happened. Because many would deny that it did, depriving the victims of dignity and history of truth. Fingernail scratches in the crematoria walls of Auschwitz, asks the neo-Nazi website The Stormer? “Jewish mythology says ‘yes.’ Science says ‘no.’” You must know this, because soon there will be no more survivors, and those still alive often find it too painful, or shameful, to share their testimony, or else they have learned to suppress it so as not to trouble others. “No one wanted my memories,” writes Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens in But You Did Not Come Back. You must know this, because 2/3 of young Americans, according to a 2020 national poll, lack a rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust. “Where did the Holocaust happen?” educator Rhonda Fink-Whitman asks a Penn State student in her 2012 documentary, 94 Maidens. “I have no idea.” You must know this, as Cayrol writes in Night and Fog, because “war is sleeping, but with one eye always open.” As I write, genocide continues to be perpetuated against the Muslim Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar. “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?”
But to know – and this is a second meaning of il faut le savoir -- one must be ‘in the know,’ know where to look, how to be on the lookout, how to decode the signs. You have to be tipped off to find the “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) tucked in a small square behind the behemoth of Notre-Dame Cathedral, just as you must be ‘in the know’ to be disturbed by the memorial’s identification of those deported from France as willing “martyrs” to a cause rather than victims of state persecution by both the Nazis and the Vichy regime. The French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain is nowhere mentioned in this memorial monument, yet it deported over 75.000 Jews from France to their deaths, along with, in smaller numbers, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men and lesbians, and other ‘undesirables.’ Stroll around to the main façade of Notre-Dame to contemplate the two female allegorical figures framing it; only if you’re ‘in the know’ about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of European Christianity through the mid-20th century will you understand that one figure represents the Church triumphant, while the other, with downward cast, blindfolded gaze and broken Torah tablets at her feet, symbolizes the Synagogue. As only one photograph of this event remains, you need to be on the lookout for the tiny plaque at the foot of a bustling Parisian office building marking the site of the former Vélodrome d’hiver, an indoor bicycle track where over 11,000 Jews, including over 4,000 children, were packed for several sweltering days in July 1942 before being herded to their deaths. “A peaceful landscape,” writes Cayrol, “An ordinary field with flights of crows, harvests, grass fires. An ordinary road where cars and peasants and lovers pass. An ordinary village for vacationers – with a marketplace and a steeple – Can lead all too easily to a concentration camp.” Il faut le savoir.
“Every hour of every day,” writes Hélène Berr, a young upper-class French Jewish woman who survived a year in deportation before being beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen, “there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill. There are men wo know and who close their eyes, and I’ll never manage to convince people of that kind, because they are hard and selfish, and I have no authority. But people who do not know and who might have sufficient heart to understand – on those people I must have an effect.” Let us – we who in Primo Levi’s words “live safe in [our] warm houses,” armed with all we have learned this semester, make the “painful effort to the tell the story” to all those who will listen, “those with sufficient heart to understand.” Because the world must know. Yes, il faut le savoir.
","Jean Cayrol, Alain Resnais","Night and Fog (1955)",,"Spring 2021","Willa Z. Silverman, 62, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Penn State University",,,,,,il-faut-le-savoir,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"From one of my graduate students at Penn State (Morgane Haesen, whose ""Moment"" you published)","Documentary Films,Emotional Experience,Film and Movies,Historical Memory,History,History Education,Holocaust,Memorials,Memory,Teachers & Teaching,War",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/433/syn-ecc_NotreDame1-296x300.png,Text,,1,0
"Bringing What I Love Into A New Field",,"Taking an art class, I incorporated my love for the sport I do into my work. This is a white charcoal on black paper of my friends and me at the Yale Invitational putting our legs up on the wall after a hard night of racing. Translating moments like these into art allows for a special remembrance of the events which is nice for everyone to look back on what they've done.
The humanities gave an opportunity for friends to record a moment in history together. A photo exists of the moment, but after taking the time to draw this out over a few weeks and work on each and every person with fine detail, the moment really stands out in your mind and is always available to you. ","Stephen Garrett","Capturing History: Kicking the Feet up After a Job Well Done",,"January 2014","Stephen Garrett, 21, Student",,,,,,bringing-what-i-love-into-new-field,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Charcoal Drawing,Cross-Country Running,Drawing,Memory,New Haven, Connecticut,Students,Yale University",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/122/feet.jpg,"Still Image",,1,0
"Bite Me!- A Florida Humanities Moment",,"People frequently talk about being haunted. Usually by spirits, both by the friendly Casper types and the decidedly less friendly Poltergeist types. Sometimes people are haunted by bad decisions. This is a spectrum too. Some must repeatedly face the time we developed a temporary and acute stutter during an eighth-grade presentation. While others face a scarier specter born of a truly terrible decision, like buying a monitor lizard as a pet. Perhaps one of the most pervasive and long-lasting hauntings of all is that of our hometowns. We swear that we’ll leave it forever. Pack our bags and only talk about home to family and in the occasional childhood anecdote while we live somewhere exciting and exotic. This attitude was especially pandemic to my hometown of Orlando, FL.
You see, Florida is often presented as an exciting place for people to visit. And they do, by the millions. Everyone eventually comes to Florida, at least for a while. To quote Jerry Seinfeld: “My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.”
To offer a few examples of this phenomenon: The spiritualists founded the town of Cassadaga, FL (which still has a major spiritualist camp). Jack Kerouac bought a house in Orlando to quietly read and write. Laura Ingles Wilder briefly came to the state for her health. Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, famously came to stay. He went so far as to buy a house and began a long line of six-toed cats. The cousins of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (grandchildren of Alexander II) came to South Florida after the Revolution. One even became the three-time mayor of Palm Beach. Florida is a holiday and a safe house. It is where people come to escape—they escape the grind of daily life, illness, political prosecution, revolutions, icy winters, writer’s block, and sometimes even the law.
In these imaginings, Florida then is understood as a land where people bring ""culture."" The locals are people who supposedly accept ""culture."" This view is pervasive, and many (including me in my teenage years) believed this. It was for this reason that my friends and I dreamed of leaving Orlando and go somewhere where things happened. It all changed one afternoon, thanks to a rather unexpected humanities moment.
How I got the book in the first place is part of its random charm. In 2005 or 2006, Tom Levine—a local fisherman, author, and “character”—showed up in my parents’ two-person CPA business in Orlando, FL. Levine periodically sells his books business-to-business or in farmers’ markets in Central Florida, using his charisma and humor in equal measure. My parents declined to turn their office into a small-scale bookstore but did buy a couple of his books—including Bite Me! I, a twelve-year-old girl who didn't fish, was clearly not the intended audience. And yet, I quickly came to love this book.
Tom Levine’s Bite Me! is an admittedly unusual choice for an inspirational book. It’s a slender collection of essays about Levine’s travels. Described in one paper as “Part Hiaasen, part Hemingway,” Levine writes to celebrate nature, critique the overdevelopment of “paradise,” and of course to support his fishing expeditions. On the surface, his book Bite Me! is a humorous take on his journeys around the world. But what truly struck my interest was his deep and open love for the natural world of Florida. Levine articulates a clear argument for preserving our natural splendor. Not for tourists to ogle on vacation, but because the swamps, coastal wetlands, and pinewoods of Florida were innately valuable and worth saving—just as much as any mountain, scenic alpine lake, or rocky beach. It changed my relationship with my surroundings, I started thinking of Florida as a place within the world rather than a suburb outside of it.
This new appreciation, in turn, led me to investigate my state’s history, environment, and literature. I started reading in earnest the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Carl Hiaasen, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, and others. I realized that there was a cacophony of voices in the state who all have painted a full picture of Florida as a strange and special place that doesn’t need others to determine its worth. That the land and its many peoples are historied and important, and that Florida's troubled past and diverse actors deserved consideration. The land they lived on transformed from a boring backdrop to a central part of the Flordia story.
This radical new point of view ultimately brought me to a MA and Ph.D. on Florida’s colonial past. You can say that Florida has become, to my great surprise, my life’s work.
When I moved away for graduate school, I thought I may feel triumphant in realizing my childhood goal of leaving. Instead, I have found myself longing for the woods and beaches I used to traverse. Every time I return to this unexpected book, I feel like I’m with Levine searching the waterways and coastlines of the world to rediscover Florida and an elusive bite. From where I sit today, the ghost of my hometown still sits at my side. It floats around in my thoughts and writing and appears to have settled in for good.","Tom Levine","Bite Me!",,2005-2010,"Rebecca Earles, 27, graduate student (Rice University)",,,,,,bite-me-florida-humanities-moment,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NCH Summer Graduate Student Residency ","Colonialism,Culture,Florida,Levine, Tom,Memory,Southern United States,Storytelling",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/505/florida-landscape-3753092_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Remembering the Music","I’ve discovered that I often associate different songs or artists with events in my life. Music is such a boon to an old woman’s memories. Some songs connect to events or ideas, such as my sixth grade Christmas pageant. Some songs connect to people, such as how I remember my late uncle from the song we often lip-synced to as we worked together. Music has the power to carry more than just a melody. I remember reading how Glen Campbell had developed Alzheimer’s Disease, but even as he lost the ability to remember the lyrics, he could still play the guitar. Music stays with you long after other things are forgotten, evoking emotions that are connected to the past.","When I was in elementary school I didn’t know anything about racial conflict or even recognize there were racial differences between the kids at my school. My classmates were just friends or people I went to school with. Everyone looked different, some had freckles, some had red hair, and some were darker skinned. That all changed the year of the 6th grade Christmas pageant. The program represented waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve with two students representing a brother and sister. All the other students singing various songs. The student selected to play the brother was white while the student selected to play the sister was African American. I remember being jealous that they were getting so much attention, but I quickly forgot my negative feelings as I prepared and rehearsed my part in the program. Then, the program grew negative as the boy’s mother protested her son being on stage with a non-white sister character. He was pulled from the show. I remember being so confused because I thought this is just a play and everyone knows they aren’t a real brother and sister, so why was this such a big deal. That was the first time I remember learning about racism, and to this day I remember this moment whenever I hear the Christmas carol I sang during that program.
I’ve discovered that I often associate different songs or artists with events in my life. Music is such a boon to an old woman’s memories. Some songs connect to events or ideas, such as my sixth grade Christmas pageant. Some songs connect to people, such as how I remember my late uncle from the song we often lip-synced to as we worked together. Music has the power to carry more than just a melody. I remember reading how Glen Campbell had developed Alzheimer’s Disease, but even as he lost the ability to remember the lyrics, he could still play the guitar. Music stays with you long after other things are forgotten, evoking emotions that are connected to the past.",,,,"December, 1976","Cherry Whipple, 52, Teacher",,,,,,remembering-the-music,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Christmas Music,Christmas Plays,Connersville, Indiana,Elementary School,Memory,Music,Racism,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/9/104/carols.jpg,Text,"Teacher Advisory Council",1,0
"""An extraordinary emblematic flag""",,"I visited Barbados on a teacher professional development trip in 2018. My assigned research topic for the trip was Bussa’s 1816 slave rebellion. Within three days in April of that year, the rebellion had spread to most of the southern half of the island.
Slavery in Barbados was addressed in a limited way by tour guides and historians on the island. There were not accounts from the slaves to detail their life experience. During this trip, I viewed the rebellion as evidence that slaves were not satisfied with the conditions of their lives and wanted their freedom. In a roundabout on one of the highways in the country, there stands a statue of Bussa- hands raised, fists clenched, chains broken. However, there is no diary entry from Bussa, just accounts from the British of the importance of putting down the rebellion. We can only make assumptions about Bussa’s objectives, but we are missing his words.
In an account written in a private letter on Tuesday, April 16th, the slaves were described as carrying “an extraordinary emblematic flag.” British sketches of the flag, now housed in the National Archives in London, are the only record of the goals of the slaves. They were striving for the freedoms that had been denied to them. They wanted to marry and have access to the privileges of the planters. But they did not want to overthrow the British Crown. They wanted to be British citizens.
This flag is the voice of Bussa and his followers. Slaves were often kept illiterate in order to limit their access to the tools and ideas to agitate for freedom. In this way, their voices are lost. Without those voices, it is possible for historians and individuals to imagine what slaves would have thought or said. But those imaginations do not allow for the complexity of human thought and experience. We are missing these people and we will never truly know their lives. It is unique to have evidence of what Bussa really thought. It contributes to the recognition and understanding of the humanity of Bussa and his followers. ",,,,,"Emily Longenecker, 34, High School Teacher, Virginia ",,,,,,an-extraordinary-emblematic-flag,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Andrew Mink of the National Humanities Center","Barbados,Bussa's Rebellion (1816),History,Memory,Slavery,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/12/193/MFQ1_112_-_An_Extraordinary_emblematical_flag_-_Bussa_Rebellion_Banner_April_1816.jpg,"Still Image","Virginia Geographic Alliance West Indies Teacher Institute",1,0
"Perspectives on Commemorating the Vietnam War",,"“There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
The idea of “contested territories”, which we have wrestled with this week, can apply to how the war is remembered and commemorated too. My humanities moment came in a group discussion this week with Quynh, a Vietnamese professor. We were discussing the idea of the Vietnam War Memorial as a teaching tool and I asked her if there was a similar monument in Vietnam. She immediately said yes, there is: Sơn Mỹ. She showed me a picture of a monument that I assumed had the names of Vietnamese soldiers until she handed me a piece of paper with the words “Mỹ Lai Massacre”. I realized this monument contained the names of more than 500 civilians killed by U.S. soldiers in the Sơn Mỹ district in 1968. At first, in my mind, I rejected the idea that this monument could be like the Vietnam War Memorial displaying the names of all the Americans killed in the war. I didn’t want to equate a Vietnamese monument to Mỹ Lai, one of the worst events in the war, with the Wall. But I came to understand that in some ways the monuments are similar. The war made victims of both sides.
",,,,"July 24, 2018","Laura Wakefield, History Educator",,,,,,perspectives-on-commemorating-the-vietnam-war,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"National Humanities Center Webinar","Memory,My Lai Massacre, Vietnam, 1968,Statues,Teachers & Teaching,U.S. History,Vietnam,Vietnam War (1961-1975),Violence",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/13/208/vietnam_war_memorial.jpg,Text,"Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia, 1945–75",1,0
"Overlooked Histories",,"The image of this colorful sign is obviously meant to be “fun” and perhaps even funny. When I took this picture while traveling with fellow teachers and educators in Barbados, it honestly was because I thought the sign was kind of cute. But later on that day, when I thought about the sign and about looking East across the Atlantic Ocean, I had mixed emotions. The image seemed cheerful, but thinking about the sign marking the distance to Africa’s west coast made me feel anything but. All I could think about was that a few hundred years ago, African slaves on that coast were forced onto ships in chains. Those people endured a horrific journey of thousands of miles that lasted for several months, during which they endured most gruesome, horrific, inhumane treatment imaginable. Men, women, and children were separated from their loved ones, herded onto ships like animals, and packed into tight spaces to maximize cargo and profit for their captors. Many died of disease, suffocation, or drowning by throwing themselves overboard because they would rather die on their own terms than face whatever horrors awaited them at the end of their journey. Those that survived were whipped, beaten, starved, and then sold on the island of Barbados to grow sugar cane and face some of the shortest lifespans for slaves anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. These thoughts make me really upset. It’s a mixture of sadness, anger, shame and guilt that I used to push out of my mind when talking about or teaching about slavery or other less-than-cheerful topics in history in order to seem more objective or “removed”, but now I embrace those feelings. I use them to check my privilege, and to fuel the fire in me as a teacher and lifelong learner to learn as much as I can about the events and people in history who are so often underserved or overlooked because they aren’t “pleasant” or nostalgic enough to be “fun” to teach or learn about.
My trip to Barbados was an eye-opening one in many ways (some unexpected). I discovered that some of my own ancestors are buried on that island, and I learned that they were sugar planters and slave owners. This discovery further affirmed my belief that everyone is connected. Those connections might be rooted in the past, but they shape our present in ways that we don’t always fully, consciously acknowledge or understand. I wasn’t surprised by this information, and I also make no effort whatsoever to hide it. I don’t want to hide it. I don’t want to feel neutral or indifferent about it. I don’t want to ignore it or bury it or pretend that it doesn’t matter. It does matter. It matters because my privilege as a white person living in the United States is built on the forced movement and enslavement of African people. My ancestors came to the Americas of their own free will, and profited from slave labor in Barbados before they moved further north to Virginia. Those are the facts. The life that I now live and the comforts that I enjoy are byproducts of slavery, and to deny that fact would be unconscionable.
As a teacher, it is my responsibility to convey to my students that the impact of slavery cannot be underestimated. It is my job as an educator to not only be an objective purveyor of knowledge and information, but to help students contextualize why historical truth matters and how white privilege allows people to feel neutral and indifferent about slavery. Removed or neutral feelings about slavery are artifacts of white supremacy. Slavery isn’t something that should be taught only as a part of a unit on European Exploration and Colonization of the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade defines the American experience for all of us. The modern history of this entire hemisphere and of the entire world is defined by it. In my 10th and 11th grade classes, students do have questions about slavery and the slave trade. Unfortunately, they often sound a bit like this: “It happened, it was bad, but should we really worry that much about it? Do we really know what slavery was like? Do we really need to talk about it that much? Does it really affect people living in the 21st century?” This trip to Barbados, and the humanities moment that I had there only reaffirmed my belief that the answer to all of those questions is: YES. ",,"A sign that I photographed while on the Atlantic coast of the island. ",,,"Kristen Wilson 30 years old, history teacher in Albemarle County, Virginia",,,,,,overlooked-histories,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"From Andy Mink","Ancestry,Bathsheba, Barbados,History,History Education,Memory,Slavery,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/12/226/Africa_This_Way.jpg,"Still Image","Virginia Geographic Alliance West Indies Teacher Institute",1,0
"An epiphany over a statue of Gandhi",,"In front of the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta you’ll find this statue of Mohandas Gandhi. For years I have used a photograph of this statue to introduce our Indian Independence unit to my 7th graders with the prompt “Why is this statue of Gandhi in front of the King Center?” My students are already familiar with the American civil rights movement, and this inquiry was always a great hook to learn about Gandhi’s system of nonviolent civil disobedience, which Dr. King utilized so effectively.
Recently a substitute teacher asked a question that made me re-evaluate this prompt and the lesson I’d been teaching. During a casual conversation at lunch she asked me, “Why is Gandhi’s statue in front of the King Center?” I started to talk about satyagraha and how King found inspiration from Gandhi’s methods of protesting injustice, when she stopped me. “No, why is a statue of a racist in front of Dr. King’s museum?”
I was taken aback. It’s true, Gandhi’s racism toward people of African descent is well documented. He wrote about the black people of South Africa using derogatory terms like “Kaffir” and lamented the indignity of being imprisoned with native Africans. He spoke out against forcing Indians to share the same communities with Africans and condemned the denigration of Indian genes through marriage with black people.
Without realizing it, I had been teaching a sanitized version of Gandhi’s legacy. This moment opened a whole box of questions. For example:
- Surely, Dr. King knew about Gandhi’s views. Yet, he chose to ignore these for the sake of what he could accomplish by using Gandhi as a role model. What does that say about Dr. King? Was he selectively ignoring the racism or was his character so strong that he could look past this?
- Who “owns” history? Historians who seek to paint the clearest, most accurate record of the past? Or people who use those lessons for their own purposes?
- Was my pride in engaging students with history in a way that was easy for them to digest misplaced? Have I been doing them a disservice all these years?
So, I’m embracing a new approach. History is messy and needs to be taught that way. Exposing students to all sides of a story gives them a better chance to explore the nuances and form their own opinions. It can also give them a deeper appreciation for figures like Dr. King.",,"Statue of Mohandas Gandhi ",,"September 2018","Rick Parker, Middle School Social Studies Teacher",,,,,,epiphany-over-gandhi,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,TAC,"Atlanta, Georgia,Civil Disobedience,Gandhi, Mohandas,History,History Education,King, Martin Luther,Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change,Memory,Racism,Statues,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/229/Gandhi_Statue.jpg,Text,,1,0
"A Poem Remembered, a World Created",,"During the past several weeks I've been drafting some thoughts I've had for a number of years regarding the way we learn from nature and from other people's thoughts and writing. My Humanities Moment is a poetic description of a memory I had that was prompted by a poem from Alfred Tennyson -- ""Flower in the crannied wall."" The moment when this poem, this memory, and this essay came together is an example of the boundless and unpredictable infectiousness that operates between the minds of people and the objects and symbols of the natural world. I explain how the little flower in Tennyson's poem prompts my own memory of a little tree resiliently hanging onto its life in a canyon wall. While writing, this tree acquired more meaning for me when I addressed it in a personal way, almost as if to both a teacher and interlocutor. Prompted by Tennyson, I came to see in this tree the meaning and expression of human life and the nature of our struggle in defying the forces that oppose us and bring us to despair. I wrote this essay resembling the form of free verse, as I thought that was the best way to convey the tone and intimacy of my humanities moment. My moment is about the multi-lateral connection that is preserved by words and memory between the past and the present, between the natural world and the human world, and between human minds separated by the centuries.
A Poem Remembered, a World Created
I read a poem by Tennyson the other day. A very short poem. Only six lines:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Sometimes a very short poem can capture the desire of the human race. This flower took my mind to a tree I once saw growing in a rock. So I wanted to try what Tennyson did:
Little pinion growing in the cliff, how you hang, how you droop, parch and slant. How you survive. I watch you crouch so high at the sun, and defeat it by your years. The needles of your humility still stay green. Each day you face the fall. And each day you cling to that sheer rock. The peace that city dwellers seek emanates not from you, but only the repose that comes from fear. The pain of the wilderness speaks in your sun-bleached bark. Without consolation is this heat. You preserve the mystery of existence and give no assurance that nature is my friend. The grandness of your story is found in the scarcity of your speech. Words from you are dumb, reminding me that I am not home in this world. I must be honest in your presence. You dare even as you stick. The passage of time, with its change and continuity, never escape your sight. You may tire of the cycles — the filling and drying of the winding creeks, the wetting and burning of the sand, or the traces of green, then yellow, of the trees and grass below. But you abandon them not. The hope you have comes only in these colors. For you do not see water itself. In you is that long war against gravity, against wind and the breaking of ice, against the fracture of rocks that choke a little more of your soil each year. In you is the secret of striving. Something whispers that what God would tell me he tells me through you. The clench of your roots teach me that the world is not meant to disintegrate, but to fight, to withstand, to last. Together we testify what will adds unto nature. You are the ambition of our poetry, the conceit to capture meaning behind the surface. We need you to see ourselves, and we need you to point us beyond ourselves. Little pinion, I speak to you in my memory. When I saw you those decades ago, a seed from your cone blew toward me and planted in my heart. That seed has grown into a sequoia of significance. I had neglected you until I read a poem by a man over the ocean, a man who lived in green and did not know this arid west, nor these mountains of rock. His soft flower became the pluck of your pine. And so across time and across this globe, the union between your kind and mine has solidified. Before you were a tree, but now you are a world.",,"""Flower in the crannied wall,"" a poem written by Tennyson and also an experience I had observing nature in the desert southwest",,"A few decades ago","Nathan Nielson, 44 years old, writer and director of Books & Bridges, a humanities nonprofit organization",,,,,,poem-remembered-world-created,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Heidi Camp and Nora Nunn contacted me some time ago, told me about the project, and asked me to write this essay.","Books & Reading,Environmental Humanities,Flower in the crannied wall,Memory,Nature,Poetry,Tennyson, Lord Alfred",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/235/desert-3453545_340.jpg,Text,,1,0
"""The Town that Freedom Built"": Preserving Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville",,"This plaque, and several others, are sprinkled throughout Eatonville, Florida to guide a walking tour of America's first legally established self-governing all-African American municipality. Eatonville was established in 1887. The town gained popularity from its depiction in Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).
Sadly, 100 acres of Historic Eatonville has been lost due to expansion of the Greater Orlando area and Interstate 4. However, The Historic District of Eatonville was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 3, 1998. The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community has been working to make Eatonville an internationally recognized tourism destination, to enhance the resources of the town, and to educate the public of its cultural significance and the community's heritage.
I came to Eatonville because of my research and love for Zora Neale Hurston. Inspired by scholars such as Alice Walker, who worked to find and mark Hurston's final resting place, I too am aspired to keep Hurston's legacy from disappearing. The dilapidated plaques that are supposed to guide and educate the public about the importance of Eatonville are impossible to read.
The sight of these plaques awakened a call-to-action inside of me. Since this moment, I have been working to digitally preserve Zora Neale Huston's Eatonville through geospatial technology and augmented and virtual reality technology. This technology has the capability to tell these stories in ways that are immersive and accessible. By digitally preserving these stories, future curious minds will be able to explore and share the experience.",,"Eatonville Walking Tour Plaques",,"February 2014","Valerie Rose Kelco, UNC-Greensboro, Literature",,,,,,zora-neale-hurston-eatonville,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston","Dust Tracks on a Road,Eatonville, Florida,Geographic Information Systems (GIS),Historical Markers,History,Hurston, Zora Neale,Memory,Public Spaces,Their Eyes Were Watching God",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/15/317/Eatonville_Plaque.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Summer Residents 2019",1,0
"Warmth of a Blanket",,"From the moment I was born I was wrapped in the warmth of a blanket. The doctors and nurses took me, wrapped me up and placed me on my mom to keep me warm and safe. Of course I don’t remember this but I am constantly told this story.
Throughout my childhood I have had a blanket that I was wrapped up in. A blanket that I took everywhere. I would go places and have this to be my safety, my security, my warmth. There is something about being wrapped tight in a blanket, something about it that gives you that big hug you might need when you don’t think you need it. I love the feel of the fabric against my face, the smell of the fresh laundry, it reminds me of home or loving parents, it gives me comfort.
I think that everyone should have a favorite blanket. During a time in my life where I felt lonely and sad, when there were things happening out of my control, I was given a blanket. It was a blanket made of a minky material that was heavy and warm. It was given to me to be a reminder that I am safe and loved.
If this blanket could tell stories it would have many to tell, as it has been on many journeys. When I have been unable to have a blanket with me, I find that I wear a heavy coat, even when the weather is contradicting such options. This simple coat gives me the same feelings of security and holds in all those emotions that a simple constant hug can give. I have used this blanket for more than just warmth sometimes it became my blanket hut that I could escape the world around me. I could create a fun tent to play in, make believe, and even at times sleep in.
A simple blanket can warm someone without a home, can give comfort to a small child, can remind you of a loved one no longer present, and can even be passed down through generations. I have even seen some people make blankets into pillows or wall art.
I believe having a blanket in your life can bring so much joy and peace. I continue to use this blanket today. The simple warmth of a blanket allows me to feel love when I choose to be alone, embraces me without emotion, and gives me comfort to sleep well during the night. ",,,,,"Morgan B., 18, HS Senior",,,,,,warmth-of-blanket,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,school,"Comfort,Family,Memory",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/425/Blanket_HM.jpg,Text,,1,0