"on a small radiant screen honeydew melon green are my scintillating bones"
Gwen Harwood's "Bone Scan" will always have a place in my heart when it comes to my inspiration for teaching Literature and my abiding interest in the humanities. Growing up in Singapore, the educational environment I was in did not prioritize literature and the humanities very much, and math and science were the core subjects that we were expected to focus on. <br /><br />However, when I was 18, I had a literature teacher who taught and prepared us to appreciate unseen poetry for the A levels and among the poems she introduced us to was "Bone Scan," which we later realized was her way of explaining her long absence from the classroom near our national exams. She was struggling with cancer and her teaching allowed us to appreciate that the poem's use of the word "scintillating" and the use of sibilants represented her desire to regard her struggle with cancer as a positive and hopeful journey rather than one to think about negatively and pessimistically. Although she eventually passed on, her influence continues to inspire me to be a better teacher and reader of literature, and continues to remind me of the importance of being attentive and committed to the text before us. I continue to return to "Bone Scan" and think how we approach, study, encounter, and teach literature reflects how we approach, encounter, and interact with others in our lives as well.
Gwen Harwood
"Bone Scan"
2010
Eunice Ying Ci Lim, 29, Ph.D. Candidate, Pennsylvania State University, Comparative Literature and Asian Studies
on-a-small-radiant-screen
"Three Mountain Pass" - Connecting to Vietnam
For teenagers, the world they live in is often described as “normal” and everything else is “weird.” One of my goals as a history teacher is to help my students recognize difference, but also to feel connected to people who lived in a much different place and time than them. Ho Xuan Huong’s poem, “Three Mountain Pass“ provoked in me admiration of her artistic talent, curiosity (“Who is this woman who can write such clearly sexual poems in 18th century Vietnam?”) and a sense that we had a shared experience of love and passion that shortened the distance between us.
“Three Mountain Pass” helped me understand the extremely high value Vietnamese culture places on poetic imagery - such that transgressive poetry could flourish because of its beauty. It also made me think deeply about the space Ho Xuan Huong carved out to express herself (and challenged the notion, propagated by American media, of Vietnamese women as passive objects, rather than educated artists with agency.) I am grateful to John Balaban for helping to bring these poems to me and to an American audience more generally, and that I was able to first feel a deep connection to Vietnam through this poem.
"Three Mountain Pass": https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/three-mountain-pass/
"Three Mountain Pass" by Hồ Xuân Hương
Lindsey Graham, 27, history teacher
three-mountain-pass
“Fern Hill”: the fleeting, eternal magnificence of Innocence
<p>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 <em>Don Quixote</em>, but to describe that would be to reveal the ending, which I would feel queasy doing.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Thomas’s second stanza begins,</p>
<p>And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns<br /> About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,<br /> In the sun that is young once only,<br /> Time let me play and be<br /> Golden in the mercy of his means</p>
<p>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 <em>Friday Night Lights</em> has in mind when he says, “My heart is full.”</p>
<p>In a way, the ending of “Fern Hill” brings me to what I love so much about <em>Don Quixote</em> 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.</p>
<p>Thomas:</p>
<p>Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that Time would take me<br /> Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,<br /> In the moon that is always rising,<br /> Nor that riding to sleep<br /> I should hear him fly with the high fields<br /> And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.<br /> Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,<br /> Time held me green and dying<br /> Though I sang in my chains like the sea.</p>
<p>Whenever I read “Fern Hill,” and whenever I think of <em>Don Quixote</em>, 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 <em>both</em> green and dying.</p>
"Fern Hill," a poem by Dylan Thomas
I can trace it to several instances, including my original interaction with the poem, but the photo I use was taken in July 2012.
Carl Rosin, 51, teacher
fern-hill
<em>Hamilton</em> and the Performance of Poetry
<p>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, <em>Hamilton</em>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
M. H. Abrams, Lin-Manuel Miranda
Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical <em>Hamilton</em>; M.H. Abrams' <em>The Mirror and the Lamp</em>
Thomas Scherer, Consultant, Spencer Capital Holdings
thomas-scherer-abrams-hamilton-poetry
A few lines of poetry might be all we need...
My students were so engaged in this lesson, and I am sure some of these words and images continue to affect them today. I certainly hope my humanities moment enriched their lives and changed the way they thought about our world then and now.
<p>I remember seeing the images on the television, in newspapers, and in magazines. It was such an epic event. The Berlin Wall was coming down, something I never imagined would happen. As a child in the 50s and 60s, I remember bomb drills during elementary school.</p>
<p>Several of my friends had fallout shelters in their homes. I used to be afraid of bombs, of communists, of Khrushchev. I tried to understand how a wall could divide the city of Berlin into two very different places.</p>
<p>And then, in 1989, the unbelievable happened. I had just accepted an interim job teaching Senior English at Mooresville High School, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with such a momentous moment in history. Just a few lines from Stephen Vincent Benet’s <em>John Brown’s Body</em> made everything crystal clear and powerful.</p>
<p>Sometimes there comes a crack in Time itself. <br />Sometimes the earth is torn by something blind. <br />Sometimes an image that has stood so long <br />It seems implanted as the polar star <br />Is moved against an unfathomed force <br />That suddenly will not have it any more.</p>
<p>Those six lines provided so much focus for our classroom discussion and reflection... and awe.<br /><br />My students were so engaged in this lesson, and I am sure some of these words and images continue to affect them today. I certainly hope my humanities moment enriched their lives and changed the way they thought about our world then and now. <br /><br /></p>
Stephen Vincent Benet
Stephen Vincent Benet’s lines from <em>John Brown’s Body</em>
November, 1989
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Nancy Gardner</a>, educational consultant and NBCT teacher
a-few-lines-of-poetry
A Lifetime of Humanities Moments
<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>
Peter A. Benoliel, Chairman Emeritus, Quaker Chemical Corporation
benoliel-lifetime-humanities-moments
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. <br /><br /><strong>A Poem Remembered, a World Created</strong> <br /><br />I read a poem by Tennyson the other day. A very short poem. Only six lines: <br /><br /><em>Flower in the crannied wall, </em><br /><em>I pluck you out of the crannies, </em><br /><em>I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, </em><br /><em>Little flower—but if I could understand </em><br /><em>What you are, root and all, and all in all, </em><br /><em>I should know what God and man is.</em> <br /><br />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: <br /><br />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
A Shared Poem
I discovered the poetry of William Blake on a bookshelf in San Francisco. Set beside the works of Charles Baudelaire, and other books I’ve long forgotten, Blake’s poems had rested on the shelf in my grandparents’ home for years. I was unfamiliar with Blake’s work at the time, but, during a visit in high school, I took his poetry from the shelf for some late-night reading. I flipped through the pages of Blake’s work without expectations, and I soon found what became my favorite poem, “The Human Abstract.”
I read through the poem countless times that night, and I found myself thinking about it still the next morning. By the time I returned home from my visit, I was eager to memorize the poem. I told my parents that I wanted to read more of William Blake’s work, and my father seemed somewhat surprised. His surprise wasn’t due to my interest in poetry, but rather in this particular poet. I explained that I’d recently discovered my new favorite poem, and launched into an explanation of what I’d read. My father quickly replied that “The Human Abstract” was his favorite poem, and it had been his favorite poem for many years.
I had unintentionally discovered my father’s copy of William Blake’s work, left in his parents’ home in his old childhood room. I never knew that he had read Blake’s poetry when he was younger, nor did I know that he’d taken a college course focused on William Blake. As it turned out, my brother’s name, William had even been chosen with William Blake in mind. These connections astounded me. My father and I don’t typically enjoy the same literature, and we’d never discussed poetry before that conversation. However, my coincidental discovery of the Human Abstract revealed our connection across generations. We shared the same fascination with the poem, and we found ourselves diving into a discussion of our thoughts on Blake and poetry. “The Human Abstract” has become an enduring topic of conversation for my father and I, and I’m grateful to have stumbled upon this poem on a night when I couldn’t sleep.
"The Human Abstract" by William Blake
2008/2009
Carolyn A. Levy, 28, PhD Candidate, Penn State University
shared-poem
Discovering Contested Territory Through Vietnamese Folk Poetry
Until this summer institute, I had never heard of the Vietnamese folk poetry known as ca dao. To be honest, I had never even thought of Vietnamese people having a poetic tradition at all. I, like so many other Americans, had relegated Vietnam to an inert location on a map or a tidy historical category. I could barely conceive of a Vietnam beyond the context of American military intervention. Even as we learned about the legacies of European colonialism in the initial seminars, I still saw Vietnam as an almost passive landscape trodden over by successive waves of foreign invaders. In effect, I had made Vietnam a victim in its own story. That changed for me when I heard professor and poet John Balaban talk about his experience collecting and publishing for the first time the oral poetry of Vietnamese farmers. Balaban spoke of an ancient people, full of history, full of passion, and full of pride, inundated by the monsoons that swept away the architectural vestiges of power that we in the “West” have come to rely on so heavily for our historical identity. What was left was a long, beautiful tradition of oral history preserved in the daily life of simple farmers. As Balaban eloquently writes in <em>Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry</em>, poetry flourished “in villages where the lone singer can hear his or her voice against the drone of crickets, the slap of water, or the rustling of banana leaves in the wind (p. 2). This line jolted me out of my facile characterization of Vietnam and its people. Long before the French cast their colonizing net over the people of Vietnam, long before the Americans stumbled into their disastrous war, long before there even was a place called Vietnam, a lone singer could hear her voice “against the drone of crickets, the slap of water, or the rustling of banana leaves in the wind.” The theme of our institute was “Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia.” At first glance, I assumed that we would be discussing America’s involvement in the so-called Vietnam War of the twentieth century; after two weeks of intense study, I have realized that I fundamentally misread the title of this institute. To study contested territory is not to examine how America and the Viet Cong fought bitterly over this hill or that, but rather to place America in the context of an ancient regional story that is crowded with diversity and life. “America’s Role in Southeast Asia” says nothing of dominance or destiny – it was my enculturation as an American that read into it such a teleological narrative. Contested territory, like so much else, starts, and perhaps ends, in the mind.
<em>Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry</em> by John Balaban
Wednesday, July 18th, 2018
Kevin Shuford
discovering-contested-territory-through-vietnamese-folk-poetry
For the First Time It Felt Like Someone Was Writing About Me
English teacher Justin Parmenter describes how his encounters with essays by Thoreau and Emerson, and later with the poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” helped him to understand how literature can provide both an escape from the troubles of life and a connection to others who’ve seen and felt the same things though they may have lived centuries before.
By seeing himself in the transformative literature of Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Emerson, Parmenter felt like he had “the power to make changes” in his own life. Wordsworth’s Romantic vision and Thoreau’s and Emerson’s Transcendentalist philosophy jointly endowed Parmenter’s worldview with a greater meaning. As a teacher, he strives to cultivate a sense of personal connection between his individual students and works of literature.
The works of William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Justin Parmenter, Charlotte Mecklenburg School District, NC
thoreau-emerson-wordsworth
Haunted by Homer’s Sirens
This particular poem helped me to think about a challenge that I was facing in a different way, and helped me try to bring some sense to it. It was a catalyst to help me focus on the present and the “now,” and the worries that come with all of the things that you can’t control, in the future and the past, need to be chased out.
<p>About seven months ago, our son was in a tragic ski accident, and was in a coma for close to a month. And during that really painful time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Was he ever going to wake up? Was he not going to wake up?</p>
<p>I, myself, couldn’t sleep and I was haunted all the time by thoughts of what might happen to him in the future, and how did this happen, and thinking about the past. And I remember thinking in one of those late-night moments about “The Odyssey” and about the description of the sirens on the banks. Of Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast, and having beeswax in his sailors’ ears, and realizing I had these kind of spirits that were haunting me.</p>
<p>In that context, I remember thinking very directly, “I know what those sirens are. I know what that’s about.” I didn’t know before then what—at least for me—that poem was saying. And at that moment, I realized the sirens were really from the future and from the past, and that in dealing with this situation with our son—the only way to deal with this—was by staying very much in the present.</p>
Homer
The Odyssey
Kevin Guthrie, founder/president, ITHAKA
kevin-guthrie-homers-sirens
Have One on Joanna Newsom
As I considered a range of options for my Humanities Moment, I instinctively knew it would come down to music, which is the element that moves me most often and intensely in my daily life. However, my tendency to live within particular soundscapes for hours or days on end also means that my moment is entangled with longer histories and hard to pin down in time and space. If anything, the album <em>Have One on Me</em> that yielded my “moment” has taught me a different, more unbounded relationship with time. But first, a little bit of background on the artist and how I discovered her. <br /><br />I found Joanna Newsom in a Facebook post by a scholar I had met at a James Joyce summer school in Trieste, Italy. I had loved this person's academic work on literary hoaxes but as our social media afterlives showed us, our most vital point of connection was our love for women musicians with strange voices. I made it a point to check out any song he posted, and in late 2015, one of those songs turned out to be "Sapokanikan" from Newsom's latest release, <em>Divers</em>. "Sapokanikan" is notorious (within admittedly niche circles) for rhyming its titular word--an indigenous place name--with "Ozymandian"--an adjective crafted from Shelley's famous poem ("Ozymandias") about transience, infinity, and human hubris. This parallel is a neat glimpse into how the rest of the song traces the ebb and flow and layering of human histories in a single place. The audacity of it could be obnoxious, just as the music video of Newsom skipping down the streets singing straight into the camera could be precious. But none of it felt overindulgent to me. <br /><br />The density of the lyrics allowed Newsom's voice to soar, at moments to hair-raising pitches that could have come straight from her harp or accompanying strings. Her earnest playfulness presented the mythic scope of her song with a disarming wink. And so my love for Joanna Newsom sprouted, easily and effortlessly. At times, I was troubled by how her love of myth led her to paint mystical pictures of "ethnic" cultures, or to string together different cultural references a bit too lightly and whimsically for the material histories of inequity that they grazed against. Nonetheless, I found the grand scale of her work personally liberating, and she always seemed to be aware of the fragility inherent in any overinflated image--whether in the way men saw women, or civilizations saw themselves. <br /><br />But while I grew obsessed with Newsom's discography, I could never seem to get into her album <em>Have One on Me</em>. An over two hour-long triple album, it already posed a challenge to attention spans, almost testing the quality of her fans’ devotion. But a bigger problem for me was that the album seemed to lack her trademark energy and graspable forms that usually provided an entry point into her complex compositions. Unlike the sparkling and robust folk tunes of her debut, or the almost classical shifts in pace and melody in her later work, <em>Have One on Me</em> had a meandering, repetitive quality to my ears. The lyrics were devastating as usual, the singing was heartfelt, the overall sound was polished, but I failed to find that hook, that leap, that burst of vibrancy or ethereal lull that would transport me to Joanna’s universe. <br /><br />At some point in the Spring semester of 2021, I was relying desperately on music to help me complete a dissertation chapter draft while my country was being ravaged by the second wave of COVID-19 and the disregard of a cold-blooded central government. My nerves were frayed--I craved a protective cocoon of music but not one so stimulating that I would be led away from my work. <em>Have One on Me</em> suddenly seemed like a good option. It may have been my least favourite Joanna Newsom album, but it was still Joanna Newsom. The album was expansive, elegant, and my distance from it could only help my focus. It turned out to be a great choice--the intricacy of the sound became a calming swirl around me as I plunged into the depths of my writing. <br /><br />But after days of writing successfully to <em>Have One on Me</em>, something changed. The album was no longer a soothing but distant friend, no longer an amorphous mass of pretty and mysterious textures. I felt as though I had suddenly obtained the ability to see and hear at close range. Songs had intimately familiar outlines and phrases. The album wasn’t untethered, it was a deeply emotionally grounded narrative that left no stone unturned for the sake of the story that might lurk beneath. In a sense, <em>Have One on Me</em> occupies the most relatable of genres--the breakup album. But like Bjork’s <em>Vulnicura</em>, it is a breakup album that stretches and grasps and generates more than it fixes, fixates, or breaks down. The title track laughingly announces the singer’s separation from a hurtful ex-lover. “Baby Birch” mourns the loss of a baby, never held or seen. “California” makes an emphatic choice to protect the “border of… [the singer’s] heart” but still admits that the powerful habits of love wind her up like a cuckoo clock. It is easy to confuse something capacious for something overindulgent if we have been taught to trust bite-size pieces of wisdom and catharsis. <em>Have on One Me</em> was a vital corrective to those habits that I’ve acquired. <br /><br />And I could not have been more wrong about the album’s pacing--I realized that everything about it was dynamic. Some songs, like the title track, are a richly embroidered tapestry, with subtle incremental shifts in the musical pattern. “Baby Birch” starts as a slow, pained crooning and swells into a tumultuous but triumphant section with strong percussion. “Go Long,” a bewilderingly compassionate indictment of toxic masculinity, switches between a regular and a high register with an unearthly ease while the shimmering harp in the background takes over in a wordless concluding meditation. The final song, “Does Not Suffice,” imagines the ex-lover’s home slowly returning to a masculine starkness as the singer removes all her items of clothing before her departure. It is once contemptuous and empathetic, self-aggrandizing and vulnerable. The gentle, ambling melody is almost identical to an earlier song, “In California,” with a whiff of added melancholy and fewer variations this time round. The ending however, is a dark and thunderous banging on a cluster of musical instruments all at once. <br /><br />In the height of my newfound obsession with this album, I listened to it all the time--with headphones on, through my portable speakers, on my laptop speakers, and even directly through my phone. When “Does Not Suffice” drew to a close, my phone surprised me by the sheer contained violence that exploded from its inadequate sound system. As the instruments pounded away, it felt as though there was a ghost trapped in my device. I remember that visceral quality straining past technological barriers as a reminder of much energy there is in Joanna Newsom’s music, and particularly in the album that I had underestimated.
Joanna Newsom
<em>Have One on Me </em>(2010) by Joanna Newsom
Spring 2021
Anushka Sen, 30, Ph.D. Candidate, teacher, emerging translator
have-one-on-joanna-newsom
Here I Am
This might be a total Millennial generation kind of humanities moment, so readers be warned. One day, I was scrolling through social media when I came across a post from a wonderful calligraphy artist. It read, "and here you are living despite it all." The post reminded me of the many times in my life when I was so hurt and so devastated over something that had occurred that sometimes I didn't feel like I would survive them. There were arguments with my mom, break ups, and bad grades, and they all took their toll. So when I casually came across that post, I took a moment and realized just how far I had come and just how much I have accomplished despite those seemingly possible to overcome parts of my life. It was one of the few times I was genuinely proud of myself, my strength. Something as simple as scrolling through social media became my "aha!" moment that made me realize I'm stronger than I give myself credit for. I should be proud of who I've become, and I need to stop being so hard on myself. Something so simple became my humanities moment.
A social media post from a calligraphy artist
January 2018
Sydney, 21, student
here-i-am
Internal and External Connections through Listening: Finding Comfort in Pauline Oliveros's "The Earth Worm Also Sings"
In the final days of 2020 I, like many others, was feeling disconnected. Disconnected from my friends, my passions, and even myself. As a part of my research on sound, music, and environmentalism I came across a poem by composer, performer, and sound artist Pauline Oliveros. In her poem "The Earth Worm Also Sings" Oliveros lays out her understanding of the universe as made of and connected through sound: living, dying, and the afterlife are sonic. For Oliveros, all of existence is based in sound and vibration. “The Earth Worm Also Sings” is a 165-line stream of consciousness poem in three sections: First, Oliveros explores the sonic world of the mind, body, life, and death; Second, Oliveros describes a meditative journey in which she imagines an “alternative self, tiny enough to journey inside” the “acoustic universe” of her own ear; And finally the poem ends with a short coda which repeats material from the first section, bringing the reader full circle. Throughout the work Oliveros explores the sonic nature of the universe, a universe that is made of and connected through sound. In her holistic worldview, mind and body are connected to the cosmos through sound and vibration, and it is Deep Listening, a practice of listening to all things at all times, that allows us to access that connection. Through Deep Listening we can be returned to “the source of all beginning,” which is “abundance, fecund creativity, brilliant spark, sounding pulse, life unending.” “The Earth Worm Also Sings” encapsulates the potential depth of Deep Listening, a practice which goes beyond mere “listening” and ties one to the very essence of the universe.
In a time when I was feeling disconnected from the things that made me feel like myself, "The Earth Worm Also Sings" helped me to feel grounded while reminding me that I am a part of something larger than I could ever imagine. At the most fundamental level, Oliveros describes herself as a “community of musical cells” each of which “[sing] the song of its musical structure.” Oliveros’s sounding and listening selves function cyclically, regenerating through listening to their own sound. She writes, “I was born here to hear all my cells through my cells.” In "The Earth Worm Also Sings" Oliveros expresses a way for me to sonically connect to myself, both through listening to the sounds of my body and the sounds of my imagination. After I feel grounded in my own mind and body, remembering that my sonic self is a part of a larger sounding and listening cosmos has provided comfort in days of disconnection and isolation. Listening to the world around me, to the sounds of chirping birds, to the slam of car doors on the street, to laughter coming from my neighbors apartment, connects me to my place. Even the sounds I cannot hear—the sounds of Boethius's "musica mundana," the music of the spheres—connect me to a greater whole.
Pauline Oliveros
"The Earth Worm Also Sings"
2020
Taylor McClaskie, Musicologist
internal-external-connections-listening
Neruda and the Shimmering Lives of Lifeless Things
Reflecting on growing up as a clumsy child with two rambunctious brothers, two phrases immediately come to mind, burnt into my memory like a brand from their ceaseless repetition: "make your bed" and "they're only things." One of these ("make your bed") never failed to inspire in me a blood-boiling rage of the Sisyphean sort: after all, what was the point of making your bed if you were just going to unmake it a scant twelve hours later? The other ("they’re only things") was less affectively charged, but the well-meaning platitude applied like a balm by my mother after this or that was broken never seemed to sit right. I understood the moral sentiment, which underscored the relative importance of social relations over material goods. Yet, while I lacked the language to articulate it, it never seemed fair to cast some of these goods as inert, inherently meaningless "things." Scraggly blankets, favourite markers, even the contours of secret nooks tucked away in the crevices of the basement: these beloved things seemed to occupy some special, understated liminal space between person and mere object, between meaningful language and the absolutely mute. <br /><br />Reading Pablo Neruda’s <em>Odes to Common Things</em> was the first time that I found myself experiencing that electric connection between self and materiality through the mind of someone else—through the eyes of a poet. For Neruda, the life of a chair invokes a rich ecosystem. It is not a utilitarian object, easily cast aside and replaced with another: it is a dynamic actor in a vibrant and distinctive jungle lifescape of sounds, smells, stories, and—ultimately—symbolism. Soap, not just a cleansing agent, is the "pure delight" of ephemeral fragrance as it sinuously winds its way through the world, impressing itself on us. And all of these things, taken together, constitute more than an inert backdrop for human life: as Neruda says, "they were so alive with me/ that they lived half my life/ and will die half my death." It is Neruda's appreciation for the vitality at the heart of the seemingly mundane, the shimmering lives of lifeless things, that I try to channel whenever I am trying to philosophically express our place in the world and all of its unexpected dimensions—or trying to come to grips with the loss of a favourite coffee mug.
Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things
Approximately 2014
Sarah (Sadie) Warren, 31, PhD Candidate, Instructor, and Digital Scholarship Associate
neruda-and-shimmering-lives-of-lifeless-things
P.O.W. Poetry in Code
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.
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<ul>
<li>Line One: A B C D E</li>
<li>Line Two: F G H I J</li>
<li>Line Three: L M N O P</li>
<li>Line Four: Q R S T U</li>
<li>Line Five: V W X Y Z</li>
</ul>
<p>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 <em>Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton</em>.<br /><br />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.</p>
Borling, John L.
<em>Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton</em> by John L. Borling
W. Robert Connor, trustee emeritus, President and Director, of the National Humanities Center (1989-2002)
w-robert-connor-poetry-in-code
Poetry in Silence
Grace Momberger describes how the story of one woman’s ability to make poetry without sound altered the way she perceived the very meaning of communication.
Grace Momberger, speech-language pathologist
poetry-in-silence
Purple Heart, Purple Prose
Griswold recalls how a childhood encounter with a sentimental, “middlebrow” poem about a dog and a veteran (which makes her cry to this day) tapped into wells of empathy. She explains how such responses to aesthetic experiences, so often downplayed in academic inquiry, deserve our sustained attention—and even respect.
“They Called Him Rags,” by Edmund Vance Cooke, featured in <em>The Best Loved Poems of the American People</em>
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/griswold-place-making-regional-identity-neuroaesthetics-humanities/">Wendy Griswold</a>, professor of sociology, Northwestern University
wendy-griswold-purple-prose
Still I Rise
I have so many fond childhood memories of the Black church in which I grew up. My mother was a founding member of the church, and she was responsible for producing the annual Black History Program every February; this program showcased youth and adult members while also offering rich and detailed information about African American history.
Every year a participant was chosen to recite the Maya Angelou poem, "Still I Rise." Thus, from my early years, I heard this poem regularly during rehearsals and recited beautifully during the annual program. As I reflect back on my personal Humanities Moment, this poem deeply resonates with me. In my youth, I was completely unaware of the impact that this poem would make on the rest of my life. Nevertheless, Angelou’s words have shaped me in ways that I had not even realized until I contemplated my personal humanities moment.
As a Black woman, I have encountered numerous moments that caused me to question my abilities, my worth, and my place in the academy. Yet, the words of this poem constantly remind me that I can, and I will rise above any obstacle that is presented because I possess all the gifts that my ancestors gave.
I read and re-read this poem often and each time that I do, I find such a sense of comfort. The power of Angelou’s words are an ongoing source of strength. The opening words of the piece set a tone of resilience despite unwarranted abuse. Angelou follows by questioning the unexplainable mistreatment of Black women based on the unspoken confidence we hold.
The comparison of herself to celestial beings such as the moon and the sun invoke within me a sense of power and inherent greatness. This has bolstered me in so many situations in which I was made to feel inherently less than those around me. The poem continues to affirm that no matter the shooting of words and the cutting of eyes that I may be forced to endure, I, like air, will always rise. This poem confirms to me that I carry with me a deep-rooted past that holds so much blood, so many tears, and an innumerable number of sacrifices – yet, still I rise.
I stand on the shoulders of giants that have never received their rightful praise. Hence, I am the living and ongoing extension of their legacy I am the hope and dream of the slave; I am living my ancestors’ wildest dreams, therefore still I rise.
Maya Angelou
"Still I Rise"
Nauff Zakaria, 37, Ph.D. Candidate
still-i-rise
The Beauty of Love and Human Connection
I could go on and on regarding literature or art that has altered my perspective on life. I was tempted to write about watching beautiful sunsets that show that even the worst day can have a happy ending. However, I had to choose a passage from Rupi Kaur’s <em>Milk and Honey</em> which taught me that instead of filling our lives with worry, we should focus on spreading love. The passage reads: <em>most importantly love like it’s the only thing you know how at the end of the day all of this means nothing this page where you’re sitting your degree your job your money nothing even matters except love and human connection who you loved and how deeply you loved them how you touched the people around you and how much you gave them</em> <br /><br />I first read this passage while applying to college during my senior year in high school. I was so overwhelmed and worried about not getting into my number one school that I would isolate myself until everything was completed. <br /><br />Then I read this passage. I realized that in the end, it won’t matter where I go to college or the job I have. The most important thing in life is human connection. Making memories, having fun, loving and enjoying life is vital when it comes to experiencing the world as we live our lives. After reading this passage, I decided that my last year in high school should not be devoted to worry and stress, it should be the last year that I am able to make memories with the people who I have grown up with. I stopped worrying, and instead I surrounded myself with the friends that I have to part from at the end of the year. Society focuses too much on the vexatious things in life, a job, money, where we live. When we should be focusing on spreading love and being loved. Once I die, I don’t want to be remembered by my job or how much money I had; I want to be remembered for how I positively impacted the people around me. In the end, the only thing that matters is love and human connection.
<em>Milk and Honey</em> by Rupi Kaur
Late 2018
Corynn Fitzpatrick, 18, student
beauty-love-human-connection
The Courage that You Gave Me
The day that I recited an Angie Thomas poem at the St. Petersburg College’s auditorium was my humanities moment since this author is an inspiration for me. First, it was hard to speak and be there in front of so many classmates and professors because I am shy, so I hate to do presentations. Despite my insecurities, I participated in the open mic since everyone deserved to know this beautiful poem “A right to happiness.”
Angie Thomas is a Black American writer who wrote The Hate U Give, a book that tackles all the oppression and injustice that black people suffer from police violence. Since I read this book, I follow every work of Angie Thomas such as books, poems, and more. For that reason, I know this poem could motive myself to do infinite things and never keep silent.
This is a brief part of the poem, “Well, I am not one of those,
who will bow down to their woes.
I will stand up and fight,
fight for what I think I have the right…. Happiness….” This poem reminds me that no matter what, I need to make heard my voice, and be my own hero because no one else can save me.
Angie Thomas's poem "A right to happiness"
2019
I am Geraldine Galindo, I am 28 years old, and I am student at the St. Peterburg College
courage-you-gave-me
The Golden Line
<p>I started learning Latin in seventh grade because I decided it was the most difficult course I could take, and I had something to prove. I was an economically disadvantaged student in a wealthy private school, and all of my classmates knew it. I would never live in their mansions, or wear their expensive clothes, or go on their exotic vacations, so I set about making myself at least academically equal. Like most grade school students who read Latin, the poetry of Catullus was some of the first “real” literature I encountered. After the dry, contrived passages in my textbooks, the sensuous love poems and harsh invectives were a welcome change of pace. Catullus’ writing is the rare combination of accessible and beautiful — a perfect entry to Latin poetry.</p>
<p>I did not love Latin before Catullus. I was proud of my success with learning the language, and I dutifully memorized decks of vocabulary cards and recited declensions, but I worked through it without any real joy. Then, in tenth grade, Catullus’ mini-epic poem 64 seduced me and I never recovered. Catullus uses gorgeous, rich language, stunning imagery, and brilliant humor in all of his poetry, but these were not what initially hooked me. No, I fell in love with, of all things, his grammar, and at the same time Latin as a language. In poem 64, Catullus frequently employs what is called “the golden line,” a five word line usually arranged as adjective adjective verb noun noun. Writers in English cannot do this as our word order is too rigid. The precision of Latin grammar is what allowed him to use this rhetorical device and add another layer of nuance to his poetry. Latin writers were freed by the rules and structure of their language.</p>
<p>My life at the time was chaotic. I was still at the private school, shunned by my classmates. My home life was in turmoil. I had moved twelve times by then. With those golden lines, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the structure of Latin. The order both comforted and dazzled me. Latin stopped being a course in which I could prove myself and started being a passion. After Catullus, I devoured Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in high school, and went on to get my B.A. in Classics. Five words changed the course of my entire life.</p>
<p>First century Latin poetry may seem like an esoteric subject, especially one far removed from the concerns of a teenage girl in late 20th century America, but my exposure to Catullus and a learned appreciation for the elegance and beauty of Latin poetic grammar helped forge my life’s path — through college and into my career as a research librarian.</p>
<p>Experiencing the power and nuance of expression created through word transpositions in Latin grammar also opened my mind to the possibilities inherent in other languages and cultures, ideas and realms of feeling that were not only new and exciting — but that were nearly impossible to approximate in any other way.</p>
The poetry of Catullus
Brooke Andrade, Director of the Library, National Humanities Center
brooke-andrade-catullus-latin-poetry
The Perfect Invitation
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br /><br />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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
Lucille Clifton
“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton
2005 (ish)
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Patricia Matthew</a>, 49, English professor living in Brooklyn, New York
the-perfect-invitation
Wabi-Sabi: The Perfectly Imperfect
This new outlook on the meaning of beauty has been part of me since that illuminating course, in conscious and unconscious ways. It helped me come to terms with my own imperfections, value simplicity, and accept the fact that things I have loved ended. It helped me embrace my reality as it is, appreciate it, and see the beauty in it. Since then I always try to smile when I notice some damage or rust in things I own and am attached to. I do not want to quickly throw them away, rather, I pause to appreciate the changes time has imprinted on them. It shaped how I think of beauty and assisted me in undoing some of the unrealistic ideals my western culture had instilled in me. Of course, I’m not quite there yet, but I will always be grateful to that class for showing me the beauty of the real, simple, and natural.
As part of my undergraduate degree in Asian studies, I took a class on Haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry. At the time, I knew nothing about Japan beyond its youth’s obsession with Hello Kitty and similar colorful animated characters. In analyzing and understanding the magic of these three-lines poems, we talked a lot about the traditional Japanese aesthetics on which they are based. And it was nothing like Hello Kitty.
Traditional Japanese aesthetics–which can be found in their well-known gardens, teahouses, and architecture at large–not only produces well-designed artifacts and surroundings, but also promotes an acceptance of reality. Japanese aesthetics is based on a few principles that highlight the beauty in the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete (of which wabi-sabi are the more known terms to a western audience). These concepts create a realistic understanding of beauty. Taken as a whole, these aesthetic elements unveil the splendor of temporality, constant change, simplicity, imperfections, and even aging. Or, in other words, they embrace and laud life and nature for what they really are.
Growing up in a western culture, consuming beauty ideals straight from Hollywood movies, this class opened my eyes to a whole different understanding of beauty. Initially, it seemed foreign and odd, but as the course went on and I had the chance to internalize these ideas they started to make more sense than the ones I have known all my life.
This new outlook on the meaning of beauty has been part of me since that illuminating course, in conscious and unconscious ways. It helped me come to terms with my own imperfections, value simplicity, and accept the fact that things I have loved ended. It helped me embrace my reality as it is, appreciate it, and see the beauty in it. Since then I always try to smile when I notice some damage or rust in things I own and am attached to. I do not want to quickly throw them away, rather, I pause to appreciate the changes time has imprinted on them. It shaped how I think of beauty and assisted me in undoing some of the unrealistic ideals my western culture had instilled in me. Of course, I’m not quite there yet, but I will always be grateful to that class for showing me the beauty of the real, simple, and natural.
2006
Yael Lazar, PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Duke University and a curator for the Humanities Moments Project
perfectly-imperfect
Writing is My Activism
<p>Luis Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2014, explains how his love for books and libraries rescued him from a life of trouble. He notes that through books, he discovered more about people and their lives, which encouraged his interest in writing about injustice and activism.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://calhum.org/about/we-are-the-humanities" title="California Humanities: We Are the Humanities" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">California Humanities: We Are the Humanities</a>.</p>
California Humanities
Luis Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2014
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms">Standard YouTube License</a>
luis-rodriguez-writing-activism