Out Doors
by Elizabeth Bassett

I May be Near the Pint of No Return

OK, call me a whiney English major from the 1960s, if you want.
I can hear the MBA’d director now: “Let the nerd have his ten minutes on the stage, then yank him.” As the headline in the New York Times of February 25 says, “In Tough Times, Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.”
Sad – and I’d add ironic – that the headline appears just below a picture of Leonard Cohen, a truly gifted musical lyricist who has been justifying his worth for over 40 years. He is both Mick Jagger’s and John McCain’s senior, the article points out, and, without a doubt, more articulate than either of them.
Humanities are not, perhaps, what needs to be justified. In all likelihood, it’s the human condition needing a sense of purpose. And without sharing humanitarian concepts and an ability to communicate them clearly to others (those who speak our language as well as those who don’t), we could wreak more havoc on this world even than it’s experiencing at the moment. Isn’t pointing toward a tenuous future, at best, a bit restrained?
We can’t expect science alone to describe everything, can we? Actually, the theater of the absurd may be closer to the truth these days. Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir, despite their apparent naiveté and willingness to wait for Godot, have a grip on reality that mirrors ours. Theirs may even contain a bit more compassion, because, at least, they don’t see a necessity to kill others in order to make their point. They may not preach it, but they have a hint of morality lacking in many of us today They may not know what point they wish to make, but they’re not hopping behind the wheel of a “Hummer” to find out.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
Let me wax practical for a moment. The day after the Times reported on educators’ concern for their humanities classes, I found living proof in the Free Press, an example for the taking.
While perusing the Vermont Section for sports scores, engagements and Charlotte obituaries, I glanced through an article on the Isle La Motte Elementary School. Teacher and students there are studying the island’s history in light of the “Quad” or 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s passage through this area. The island served as a gateway to the territory beyond, according to Principal Dianne Reilly.
So far, so good—students seizing an opportunity to dig in and learn from their own surroundings. That, to my mind, is what educators should do.
The problem I encountered, however, came in the telling by the reporter and may offer a glimpse at the value of not dropping language as a course of study. Near the end of the article, he wrote that “students in grades K-6 embarked on an epic curriculum.”
Well, the use of that word to describe what the students were doing caught my attention. I had to read on, because I wasn’t quite certain how Milton and Homer were going to fit into this project. Had folks from The Odyssey been to the island a few millennia ago? Paradise Lost – or gained; could it help explain milfoil growth, vicissitudes in the fish populations, the emergence of more marinas? Maybe they forgot part of the word; maybe epicurean is what they meant, and they were going to indulge themselves in some high falootin’ Isle La Motte gumbo with Missisquoi Merlot on the side.
So, I headed to the next sentence. “They (students) began with geological history (the island boasts remnants of some of the oldest known coral reefs on Earth), and worked through the mythologies of native Indians.” Aha! I think I understand what the author was trying to say, but he (or his editors) used the wrong word.
An epoch curriculum – aah yes. It’s similar to that fifth-grade joke about the guy who walks into the doctor and asks to get “uuhh castrated?” The doc inquires again to be sure he heard correctly. The fellow repeats the request. Then after waking up from the operation, he turns to the patient on the gurney next to him asking what procedure that fellow had, and upon learning it was circumcision, the castratee shouts out, “That’s the word!”
So it’s about language, the medium through which we connect ourselves as human beings. And, in my forays into business, what separates effective managers from others is an ability to articulate well, clearly, and with appropriate impact, the work we undertake. It’s leadership – the ability to convince followers, a more complex task than command and obey. It has its basis in the humanities and requires developing a world perspective that numbers and business formulae alone won’t.
A recent newsletter from one of my undergraduate colleges contains an article on curricular initiatives in writing and rhetoric. A student is quoted, saying that she believes “understanding scientific information is not the same as being able to write about it.” She majors in neuroscience and Spanish. “I felt it would be remiss,” she says, “to put so much time and energy into learning about science, without ever learning how to convey that information back to the scientific community and the public.” Amen.
If you need convincing that science alone is insufficient in providing a full understanding of humankind, pick up a copy of Dexter Filkins’ book about his experiences over six years in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s titled The Forever War, and it should scare the hoot out of you. He doesn’t preach or promote a point of view. He describes his own experiences clearly and poignantly.
His English is accurate. His title is terrifying. Forever is a long time. We’re talking many humanities from now. We had better learn to communicate before then.

Now, those that were left, well we tried to survive
In a mad world of blood, death, and fire
And for ten weary weeks I kept myself alive
But around me the corpses piled higher . . .

The Pogues
“And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”