Humanity everywhere

You know when you're shopping for a car/suit/house/pet, and suddenly you can't stop noticing cars/suits/houses/pets? They're everywhere, all around you, and they always have been. You've just been oblivious because you've had no cause to notice them before.

So it is this fall, sitting in on a Humanities lecture and leading discussion sections. All the texts, all the people, all the art and the music we've studied -- they've been around far longer than I have. They've likely been referenced a million times over. And though I never took a course like this in college, surely I must've picked up a fact or two in my own time as a student. What I love about teaching: always learning, always discovering. And because the Humanities work is fresh in my mind, connections surface for me anew. Observe. A thing long-dead can be kept alive in a story, whether it's in stone, paper, or song.

A syllabus-in-the-world sampling from the last few weeks alone:

At a reading by poet and translator Khaled Mattawa, in one poem he calls to Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose "Meditations" should be required reading for Human Behavior 101.

My horoscope (Aquarius, natch) defines the Greek term daemon, from which 'demon' is derived. The original meant more of a guiding spirit, a conscience or internal force, not an evil entity.

At a They Might Be Giants concert, references abound in the song "The Mesopotamians," a TMBG-created band featuring Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal and Gilgamesh.

Finally saw the oft-recommended (and excellent) In Bruges with Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes, and what painting do the assassins happen upon in their city tour? "The Last Judgment" by Hieronymus Bosch, showing the same just retribution as Dante's Inferno.

The title story of Wells Tower's 2009 short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is Viking lore told in modern vernacular, making human the prototypical warriors of much older literature. In its last page, this story takes just a couple lines to draw sharp insight into why humans do the senseless things they do. Go read it, you'll see.

Charles Baxter's 2008 novel The Soul Thief uses the word "ravening" three-plus times, a word from the Old French, and before that, Latin, which I've seen repeatedly in our texts this semester: v. To seek or seize as prey or plunder. A word that's evolved over thousands of years, a word, like the paintings and epic stories and songs, that we continue to have use for.