A generation ignorant of history?

Today 15 percent of all college students take a single course in history. Or, that is to say, 85 percent of them don't take one. And I think if you have a nation that doesn't have a sense of history, when they set out to send an army into a Middle Eastern country, and someone assures them they will be greeted as liberators, and flowers will be strewn in their path, they may not ask the question, "Are we really sure that's true?" And I think that's dangerous for our nation and for our world. 

Victor Ferrall  (former president of Beloit College, author of Liberal Arts at the Brink), in "Who Needs an English Major?," AmericanRadioworks documentary produced by Stephen Smith (fall 2011)

Humanities scholar in the jury room

I realize now that for me—a humanist, an academic, a poetaster—the primary aim of sustained thinking and talking had always been, in a way, more thinking and talking. Cycles of reading, interpreting, and discussing were always exactly that: cycles. One never "solved" a poem, one read it, and then read it again—each reading emerging from earlier efforts and preparing the mind for future readings. The same went for understanding the past, for teaching history. Whereas scientists and mathematicians might get kudos for answering questions, for resolving problems, I had always felt that my work involved the exact opposite project: keeping the questions open. They were different sorts of questions, of course. For me, being a humanist meant committing my life to a somewhat absurd task: serving full-time as the custodian of unanswerable questions (how to live? What to do? How to know? Why?); caring for them; nudging them to the fore in a crowded world; resurrecting others, now forgotten; keeping track of long-lost answers. Such questions cannot be answered, but they are not stupid.

But this, for all its beauty (and it is, I believe, beautiful, if also, yes, a bit mad), makes exceedingly lousy training for the grim duty of actually answering—closing definitively—an immensely complicated question with swift, withering, and barbed implications: a question like, "Is Monte Milcray guilty of murder?"

D. Graham Burnett, A Trial by Jury (New York: Vintage Books, 2001) pp. 157-58.

Literature for intimacy

One of the reasons I had specialized in literature was a search for intimacy with others, whether characters, authors, or fellow readers who were willing to share what they observed in texts. Through poems, plays, stories, novels, and even nonfiction, I could see what was important to other persons, what they desired and feared, and how they suffered, fell in love, cherished their dreams, survived tragedy and faced death.

Albert Howard Carter III, First Cut: A Season in the Anatomy Lab (New York: Picador USA, 1997), p. 2.