A Harvard professor's defense of the arts and humanities...

...and the reflective people who produce them, enjoy them, and keep them alive

Helen Vendler, Harvard Gazette

But first: are you a vivid dreamer?

Our next Sunday Candlelight Chat is on Sunday, October 27, at 1 pm ET, and it should be extremely fascinating. We’re hosting Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, the authors, therapists and co-hosts of the popular podcast, This Jungian Life (almost 14 million downloads!). We’ll discuss their forthcoming book, Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, a definitive handbook on Jungian dream interpretation. And then…we’ll invite you to share your dreams, for interpretation by Lisa, Deb, and Joe!

We’ll send out log-in instructions to all Quiet Life members, in advance of the session. (Members can choose to watch quietly in real time; join in actively; and/or watch the recording later.)

And now…here’s today’s topic:

Not long ago, a Kindred Letter reader wrote this to me about her daughter, a talented writer:

"My daughter just won a writing award. She is a HS junior, 16 years old and an incredibly gifted writer. And it's pretty cool, one of only 16 in the state and under 150 nationally. She is fortunate that she has incredible English teachers, and access to writing electives all of whom encourage her. But I was struck that our Blue Ribbon School couldn't so much as give a blip on the news. We have Science events weekly, churn out awards by the dozens as part of the STEM mill that schools seem to be myopically focused on. However a child that creates on their own, something from nothing, with no infrastructure to enable it, just a kid with a piece of paper....and nothing. So thank you for speaking up, for using your voice to try to shine attention on what else matters and I hope the world starts to listen." 

This letter both saddened and maddened me. One thing it did not do is surprise me - I’ve been frustrated by the falling status of the arts and humanities for a while now, and wondering what can be done to correct this.

So today, we have excerpts from a brilliant essay by Helen Vendler, the late great Harvard poetry professor.

I love this essay because it comes to the defense of people who passionately love history, art, poetry, language, and all they represent; of people who are not necessarily “leaders” or “public servants” or varsity athletes or straight-A math students; of people who “keep the arts alive in our culture.”

This essay was originally published on Harvard’s Admissions website, and later in Harvard Magazine; you can read the full piece here. I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.

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Gargoyles Reading Books, via Ferria on X

Here’s Vendler: "…W.H. Auden famously said—after seeing the Spanish Civil War—that “poetry makes nothing happen.” And it doesn’t, when the “something” desired is the end of hostilities, a government coup, an airlift, or an election victory. But those “somethings” are narrowly conceived. The cultural resonance of the characters of Greek epic and tragedy—Achilles, Oedipus, Antigone—and the crises of consciousness they embody—have been felt long after the culture that gave them birth has disappeared. Gandhi’s philosophical conception of nonviolent resistance has penetrated far beyond his own country and beyond his own century. Music makes nothing happen, either, in the world of reportable events (which is the media world); but the permanence of Beethoven in revolutionary consciousness has not been shaken….

Future cultures will be grateful to us for many aspects of scientific discovery, and for our progress (such as it has been) toward more humane laws. We can be proud of our graduates who have gone out in the world as devoted investigators of the natural world, or as just judges, or as ministers to the marginalized. But science, the law, and even ethics are fields in motion, constantly surpassing themselves. To future generations our medicine will seem primitive, our laws backward, even our ethical convictions narrow. [Bolded by SC because this is such an interesting point.]

“I tried each thing; only some were immortal and free,” wrote our graduate John Ashbery. He decided on the immortal and free things, art and thought, and became a writer who revolutionized the transcription of consciousness in contemporary poetry. Most art, past or present, does not have the stamina to endure; but many of our graduates, like the ones mentioned above, have produced a level of art above the transient. The critical question for us is not whether we are admitting a large number of future doctors and scientists and lawyers and businessmen (even future philanthropists): we are. The question is whether we can attract as many as possible of the future Emersons and Dickinsons. How would we identify them? What should we ask them in interviews? How would we make them want to come to us?

Jessie Willcox Smith, “Young Woman Gazing,” 1900, via Oguz Pancar

The truth is that many future poets, novelists, and screenwriters are not likely to be straight-A students, either in high school or in college. The arts through which they will discover themselves prize creativity, originality, and intensity above academic performance; they value introspection above extroversion, insight above rote learning. Such unusual students may be, in the long run, the graduates of whom we will be most proud. Do we have room for the reflective introvert as well as for the future leader? Will we enjoy the student who manages to do respectably but not brilliantly in all her subjects but one—but at that one surpasses all her companions? Will we welcome eagerly the person who has in high school been completely uninterested in public service or sports—but who may be the next Wallace Stevens? Can we preach the doctrine of excellence in an art; the doctrine of intellectual absorption in a single field of study; even the doctrine of unsociability; even the doctrine of indifference to money? [SC: once again - I couldn’t resist bolding all this greatness.]

“…Some people in the arts do of course become leaders (they conduct as well as sing, or establish public-service organizations to increase literacy, or work for the reinstatement of the arts in schools). But one can’t quite picture Baudelaire pursuing public service, or Mozart spending time perfecting his mathematics. We need to be deeply attracted to the one-sided as well as the many-sided. Some day the world will be glad we were hospitable to future artists. Of course most of them will not end up as Yo-Yo Ma or Adrienne Rich; but they will be the people who keep the arts alive in our culture. “To have great poets,” as Whitman said, “there must be great audiences too.” The matrix of culture will become impoverished if there are not enough gifted artists and thinkers produced: and since universities are the main nurseries for all the professions, they cannot neglect the professions of art and reflection….” -Helen Vendler

Image: Jeremy Miranda

I hope you love these gems as much as I do. If so, please consider sharing them with a friend — or an educator/teacher/professor/school principal/university president!

And, as always, I ask you:

*What do you think?

*Have you had an experience like the kind mentioned by your fellow reader at the top of this Kindred Letter?

*Which bits of the Helen Vendler essay did you especially enjoy?

*And any other thoughts you may have!

Please do leave a comment below; we do love to hear from you.

P.S. In honor of our forthcoming Sunday Candlelight Chat on dreams, I leave you with this quote:

“Of the things that followed I cannot at all say whether they were what men call real or what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.”— CS Lewis, Till We Have Faces (1956) (via Duncan Reyburn)