By Harry T. Cook

11/19/10

When angst over the spiraling costs of higher education gets the better of college
and university administrations, the humanities frequently end up taking the hindmost.
Deans and faculties under pressure to recruit and keep students ponder such otherwise
tabooed questions in academe as: “Who needs to know about ‘Moby Dick’ in this job
market?”

The answer may be, “Nobody,” if one wants no more from life than economic security,
if such a thing there be. No doubt, millions of Americans have been born, lived
a decent life and died without ever hearing or reading the imperative: “Call me
Ishmael.”

It is difficult to calculate the win-lose factor when advocating for the humanities.
How is the plot of or are the characters in “Moby Dick” important to people in the
21st century? How much should a public school district or a college or university
spend on the teaching of such a piece of literature when such subjects as marketing
and computer science will probably do a better job of equipping a person for life
and work in this era?

I think here of myself at age 71 still pursuing research in Second Temple and 1st
and 2nd century C.E. Greek texts. What possible good can such research contribute?
And why would anyone bother to undertake the slog of learning Aramaic, Hebrew and
Greek so as to participate in such research? I can tell you that if money is the
end-all, then the answer to that question is that no one should bother.

Aside from such undertakings, I am, in retirement, devoting more time to re-reading
some of the Western canon, including the “Iliad,” “Critique of Pure Reason,” “Das
Kapitals,” “Swann’s Way,” “Barchester Towers,” the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald
and John P. Marquand together with those of my American literary hero Thomas Wolfe.

Why? Because I can, and because in doing so I find myself being replenished by living
now and again in the world of letters and being surprised by yet new depths of human
reasoning, emotion and experience. As again I have read (or, in the case of Kant,
Marx and Proust struggled through) those works, it is as if, in some non-pietistic
way, I am born again.

More than once I have pondered what it might have been like to have seen a stage
version of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” having had no prior knowledge of its existence.
I had never heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart before the age of 10, and my introduction
to his work was the 41st Symphony known as “The Jupiter.” I came away from it almost
in a trance.

Shakespeare and Mozart, just for example, have enriched the life of Western civilization
immeasurably, as have Homer, Sophocles and others who have followed in their train
down to the present day.

It is my argument that what’s left of that civilization will be further coarsened
by the disappearance of their works from high school and college courses. An illiterate
people is a dangerous people. If a society has nothing of substance against which
to judge the cheap and manipulative narratives with which it is bombarded by television
and other media, it is not only dangerous but vulnerable.

As long ago as 1922, Lynn Harold Hough, the sometime president of Northwestern University,
worried about the temptation to forego the humanities for more practical subjects:

Said Hough: “A great university may be tempted to think more of the brilliant and
skillful publicity which calls forth large donations than of . . . the patient research
in the laboratory, study and library which really adds to the knowledge and power
of the world . . . It may surrender the humanities to practical efficiency instead
of suffusing practical efficiency with all the grace and strength of the humanities.”

I was fortunate that in the home in which I grew up there was an inclination toward
if not an intimate knowledge of the classics of literature, history, the visual
and musical arts. I can still hear my mother playing a Beethoven piece on her worn-out
violin. I can recall a time or two when we sat around the old Philco radio and listened
to some orchestra somewhere play some composer’s symphony. Those experiences told
me I was part of a larger world and culture than it was my lot to encounter on the
ordinary day.

Then there was that hallowed moment I first laid eyes on Rembrandt’s “Lucretia.”
I knew so little of its provenance that I wondered at the tears that came to my
eyes as I stood rooted to the floor of the gallery in the Detroit Institute of
Arts.

Somewhat earlier in my life came the great revelation. I had contracted a bizarre
kind of bronchial pneumonia that required bed rest. There I lay for the better part
of 10 days with nothing but a few books and my Hallicrafters radio for company.
One winter Saturday afternoon I was twirling up and down the AM dial when suddenly
I came upon the strains of music the likes of which I had never heard.

It turned out to be the overture to Giacomo Puccini’s opera “La Boheme.” I was instantly
taken in, and for most of the next three hours listened in awe and rapture to the
singers and orchestra of what I later learned was Metropolitan Opera Company in
New York. I had little idea at the time of how magnificent a thing grand opera is,
but I was civilized [transitive verb] that day.

The sum of that — the literature, the music, the opera — has worked me over me
for more than 60 years. I can’t imagine having been useful had I not read, seen
and heard it all. The humanities need to be rescued from their increasing desuetude.
Immersion in them will make us a better people.