Amor Mundi 9/8/13
09-09-2013
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Balancing Solitude and Society
[caption id="attachment_11604" align="alignleft" width="128"]
Illustration by Dan Williams[/caption]
It is a new year, not only for Jews celebrating Rosh Hashanah but also for hundreds of thousands of college and university students around the world. Over at Harvard, they invited Nannerl O. Keohane—past President of Wellesley College—to give the new students some advice on how to reflect upon and imagine the years of education that lay before them. Above all, Keohane urges students to take time to think about what they want from their education: “You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the future. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may think you’ve never been busier in your life, and that’s probably true; but most of you have “time” in the sense of no other duties that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is what you are supposed to do with your education; it’s not competing with something else. You won’t have many other periods in your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are fortunate, you’ll have another chance; but then you will be more set in your ways, and may find it harder to change.”
Robin Kelly, writing on the 1963 March on Washington and the March's recent fiftieth anniversary celebrations, zooms out a little bit on the original event. It has, he says, taken on the characteristics of a big, feel good event focused on Civil Rights and directly responsible for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, when, in fact, all those people also came to Washington in support of economic equality and the gritty work of passing laws was accomplished later, with additional momentum and constraints. It's important to remember, he says, that "big glitzy marches do not make a movement; the organizations and activists who came to Washington, D. C., will continue to do their work, fight their fights, and make connections between disparate struggles, no matter what happens in the limelight."
Robinson Meyer investigates what, exactly, poet Seamus Heaney's last words were. Just before he passed away last week at 74, Heaney, an Irish Nobel Laureate, texted the Latin phrase noli timere, don't be afraid, to his wife. Heaney's son Michael mentioned this in his eulogy for his father, and it was written down and reported as, variously, the correct phrase or the incorrect nolle timore. For Meyer, this mis-recording of the poet's last words is emblematic of some of the transcriptions and translations he did in his work, and the further translations and transcriptions we will now engage in because he is gone. "We die" Meyer writes, "and the language gets away from us, in little ways, like a dropped vowel sound, a change in prepositions, a mistaken transcription. Errors in transfer make a literature."
Jay Rosen, who will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center’s NYC Lecture Series on Sunday, Oct. 27th at 5pm, has recently suggested that journalism solves the problem of awayness - “Journalism enters the picture when human settlement, daily economy, and political organization grow beyond the scale of the self-informing populace.” C.W. Anderson adds that "awayness" should include alienation from a moment in time as well as from a particular place: "Think about how we get our news today: We dive in and out of Twitter, with its short bursts of immediate information. We click over to a rapidly updating New York Times Lede blog post, with it's rolling updates and on the ground reports, complete with YouTube videos and embedded tweets. Eventually, that blog post becomes a full-fledged article, usually written by someone else. And finally, at another end of the spectrum, we peruse infographics that can sum up decades of data into a single image. All of these are journalism, in some fashion. But the kind of journalisms they are - what they are for - is arguably very different. They each deal with the problem of context in different ways."
Adam Gopnik makes a case for the study of English, and of the humanities more broadly. His defense is striking because it rejects a recent turn towards their supposed use value, instead emphasizing such study for its own sake: "No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die. Some idea of symbolic purpose, of pleasure seeking rather than rent seeking, of Doing Something Else, is essential to human existence. That’s why we pass out tax breaks to churches, zoning remissions to parks, subsidize new ballparks and point to the density of theatres and galleries as signs of urban life, to be encouraged if at all possible. When a man makes a few billion dollars, he still starts looking around for a museum to build a gallery for or a newspaper to buy. No civilization we think worth studying, or whose relics we think worth visiting, existed without what amounts to an English department—texts that mattered, people who argued about them as if they mattered, and a sense of shame among the wealthy if they couldn’t talk about them, at least a little, too. It’s what we call civilization."
October 3-4, 2013
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast:The Crisis of the Educated Citizen"
Olin Hall, Bard College