The Humanities: Huzzah! — Nevada Humanities

By Bill Marion

You may not know it, but October is National Arts and Humanities Month. As the Chair of the Board of Nevada Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, it has fallen on me to say something about why we should dedicate a full month to the Arts and Humanities, particularly when venerable institutions like hot dogs, apple pie, and the American flag only get a day each. This of course then leads to the questions of what are the arts? What are the humanities? These are questions that have consumed and confounded minds greater than mine, and have yet to provide any satisfactory result that inspires universal, consensual agreement. And that, perhaps, may be the point after all; the arts and humanities should be celebrated, fostered and beloved because they exceed our imagination while also fulfilling our imagination.

For me, the humanities are a central part of what it means to be human; it is that reflective sensibility that allows us, and yes even forces us to make sense of the world, to examine our role in the world, to reexamine our initial perceptions of the world, and to interpret and reinterpret those findings. To that extent, everything human-made and naturally occurring is a text that we are not only obligated to interpret, but that we also have no choice but to interpret. It is who we are, and who we have been. It will also help us prepare for who we will become.

From that perspective, a Walt Whitman poem is certainly a text, but so is Rembrandt’s Mona Lisa, Georgia O’Keefe’s calla lilies, Mozart’s Requiem, an ancient Mayan archeological site, the First World War, astronomy and our relation to the heavens, Nat Turner’s rebellion, quantum physics, science, fiction and science fiction, history, biography and autobiography, religion, architecture, and on and on and on.

For some, the art of the humanities is like peeling off layers of an onion, getting into deeper and deeper layers of meaning, uncovering new ways to look at old things and old ways of looking at new things. For me, it is more like a palimpsest, like the writing on a piece of vellum that is then erased and replaced by a second text on top. The imprint of the original text, however, is still there. And then a third text is superimposed upon the second, the third by a fourth and so on, with each text and subtext intertwined, resulting perhaps in clarity or confusion, depending upon your perspective.

This does not mean that any interpretation is valid; the interpretation must be supported by the text, however muddled it may have become --diminished by incompleteness, ambiguity or time and erosion. For example, one cannot simply deny the Holocaust and get away with it. The Holocaust happened and there is evidence. The truth is that the text exists—denying it doesn’t erase the text. In this case, the denial says more about the denier than it does about the facts. The interpreter has just become a text.

I’m reminded of the immortal lines written on perhaps the most famous of Grecian urns:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

To be overly simplistic, it may be that Beauty (whatever that may be) is the realm of the Arts; Truth (however that evolves) is the realm of the Humanities. And thus, it is appropriate that October, the month of the scales in the Zodiac calendar, is designated as the time to celebrate both. As a Libran myself, I can appreciate the delicate balance.

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