He notes that at the time he encountered the character he and Stephen were about the same age and describes how he identified his own struggles as a young Southerner with those Dedalus experiences as a young Irishman. He goes on to discuss how the figure of Dedalus has become iconic and is used repeatedly to help discuss the struggles of young artistic spirits.
Beyond personally identifying with one of Joyce’s most well-known character, William Ferris points out how “Joyce keeps renewing his presence in our lives.” The continued circulation and appreciation of literature helps us draw parallels between our experiences and concerns and those of others, across time, national boundaries, and other differences.
In this excerpt from a conversation with William Ferris, former Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, he shares how he came to see himself in Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who declares that he will fly from the nets of “nationality, language, and religion.”
He notes that at the time he encountered the character he and Stephen were about the same age and describes how he identified his own struggles as a young Southerner with those Dedalus experiences as a young Irishman. He goes on to discuss how the figure of Dedalus has become iconic and is used repeatedly to help discuss the struggles of young artistic spirits.
Beyond personally identifying with one of Joyce’s most well-known character, William Ferris points out how “Joyce keeps renewing his presence in our lives.” The continued circulation and appreciation of literature helps us draw parallels between our experiences and concerns and those of others, across time, national boundaries, and other differences.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
]]>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.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
U.S. Representative David Price: I wouldn’t exactly describe it as a moment but I can tell you about an intellectual experience that really did transform my way of thinking and influences me to this day. It has to do with when I first went to Yale Divinity School. I never became a clergyman, obviously, but I certainly got a good liberal arts education at Yale Divinity School and feel that was a time of great intellectual development for me.
One important part of that was being introduced to the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, who at that point was a very influential theologian, but he had a wide influence way beyond theological circles. He used his theological understanding—essentially understanding of human nature—to elaborate the way “small-d” democratic politics can and should work.
There’s an aphorism—which I can’t quote exactly—that’s associated with him but it sums this up rather neatly. He said once that our positive understanding of human nature makes democracy possible. Our negative understanding of human nature makes democracy necessary.
In other words, our understanding of human nature has a lot to do both with the positive possibilities we strive for in our society, the kind of aspirations that we have for a more perfect union, for expanding opportunity, for a just society. At the same time we understand that even the best intentions in politics can become distorted, can go astray by virtue of self-interest and the will to power. Therefore, it’s important that no one’s power be absolute and that we have the kind of checks and balances that, of course, we aspire to anyway in our American system.
He also understands power in this vein. In other words, we’ve always had a preoccupation in American political thought with power, and that comes partly from the Calvinist tradition, from some of the theological roots of our culture, but that, too, can lead us astray because we’ve tended to concentrate on political power as the most potent danger. Of course it can be extremely dangerous but sometimes we’re oblivious to other kinds of power. Economic power, let’s say. We don’t have a full appreciation for just how oppressive and how limiting that can be.
Moreover, we don’t always appreciate how political power can check other forms of power—as it goes back to the Antifederalist position we were discussing earlier. You don’t ever suppose that you can do away with, or have the luxury of, a totally libertarian society. Power is going to be exercised. There are going to be disparities in power. Power is going to be organized in some way, and the way we do our politics is going to have a profound influence on this. It’s much better to be intentional about that, deliberate about it, than it is to make glib assumptions about power being benign or, for that matter, power being completely dangerous.
There has to be a balance between a notion of using power, utilizing power, and checking power. Niebuhr argued very, very persuasively that our understanding of human nature, particularly coming out of our religious traditions, was an important resource. Not just Enlightenment optimism about human nature. Not just the classical liberal assumptions about natural harmonies in society. No, no. There are real conflicts and there are real abuses that are possible. At the same time, sometimes coercion is necessary. So, it’s that understanding of power, theologically rooted, that just transformed my way of thinking about politics.
So I’m going with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” instead. Its lyricism conjures the innocence of youth that cannot imagine its own end. That’s kind of what innocence is: a brilliantly perfect inability to envision its own conclusion.
Thomas’s second stanza begins,
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
We are “young once only” and we play and are golden. We all see this in the delight of children and also in the mesmerizing natural panoramas that remind me of a summer evening on a hilltop in Maine. It’s summer vacation all the time. It evokes the feeling that I think that character from Friday Night Lights has in mind when he says, “My heart is full.”
In a way, the ending of “Fern Hill” brings me to what I love so much about Don Quixote and the scene I mentioned a minute ago. Here I am, a middle-aged guy spending every day with teenagers, hoping to share and discuss with them truths about the human condition and our relationships and tragedy and beauty while they, children who are “green and golden” in their “heedless ways,” in their Eden of hope and vigor, start to gain insight about how Time holds them. They are looking toward college and work and beyond, and often they worry and fear, and although for many the curiosity of youth is sputtering, its flame is not out.
Thomas:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that Time would take me
Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Whenever I read “Fern Hill,” and whenever I think of Don Quixote, I do so from the Experience side of the divide between innocence and experience. I peer longingly over at innocence, and I wish for it…and I feel it as if it were still here. It is the wonder of the poem, and of art, that in its presence we can be both green and dying.
]]>I could do several Humanities Hours out of Humanities Moments – there are so many passages and ideas that have animated my imagination. I first find myself drawn to the heart-wrenching climax of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, but to describe that would be to reveal the ending, which I would feel queasy doing.
So I’m going with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” instead. Its lyricism conjures the innocence of youth that cannot imagine its own end. That’s kind of what innocence is: a brilliantly perfect inability to envision its own conclusion.
Thomas’s second stanza begins,
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
We are “young once only” and we play and are golden. We all see this in the delight of children and also in the mesmerizing natural panoramas that remind me of a summer evening on a hilltop in Maine. It’s summer vacation all the time. It evokes the feeling that I think that character from Friday Night Lights has in mind when he says, “My heart is full.”
In a way, the ending of “Fern Hill” brings me to what I love so much about Don Quixote and the scene I mentioned a minute ago. Here I am, a middle-aged guy spending every day with teenagers, hoping to share and discuss with them truths about the human condition and our relationships and tragedy and beauty while they, children who are “green and golden” in their “heedless ways,” in their Eden of hope and vigor, start to gain insight about how Time holds them. They are looking toward college and work and beyond, and often they worry and fear, and although for many the curiosity of youth is sputtering, its flame is not out.
Thomas:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that Time would take me
Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Whenever I read “Fern Hill,” and whenever I think of Don Quixote, I do so from the Experience side of the divide between innocence and experience. I peer longingly over at innocence, and I wish for it…and I feel it as if it were still here. It is the wonder of the poem, and of art, that in its presence we can be both green and dying.