Post date: Dec 7, 2016 5:11:35 AM
Last time I did a book count of my (multiple) bookshelves I had 834 books. It’s grown since August. I say this not to brag, or show off my intelligence, but as a statement of fact. I own more books than I can afford, and I’m perfectly okay with that. If you look at my Amazon wish list, it’s literally 5 pages of books. If you look at my bank account, you’ll see more book orders than grocery runs. I constantly find myself staring at books within stores, on other’s shelves, and in libraries. I’ve had a library card since I was four. It’s still a staple on my key ring today, 18 years later. Stories are what I live for, and they are usually contained within books.
Library visits were my favorite time of the month during school at St. Mary’s Elementary School. Every month, we would bundle up, walk 2 blocks, and go to the library to rent a book. Most of my classmates didn’t care about books, renting one or maybe two if it was a popular series; I usually rented 5 or even 9. I even had a goal to read 100 books one summer before 5th grade that I told the school nurse about. I read that number within a month.
My fondest memories with my family are book related. My mom hates to read, but she read me The Chronicles of Narnia before bed for months. My favorite childhood Christmas gift was receiving The Mistmantle Chronicles. All I wanted for my birthday and Christmas were books, and that’s still all I want.
As I grew older, I realized a rift between my love of books and how my family viewed books had emerged. Every October my grandma would ask what I wanted for my birthday, I would reply books. Her response was shocking to me: “but honey books are so impersonal, wouldn’t you rather like jewelry?”
I couldn’t see how clothes or jewelry, temporal mass produced things, could be considered personal when a book can change my world. Every book, every story impacts who I am. They are pieces of others put out into the world for people like me, for people unlike me, to see and grow with. The story of a book is a story cultivated by another human and therefore something worth living with them. Living one life is so restrictive, so boring. I'd much rather live a thousand lives through the eyes of another.
I suppose that’s why I always gravitated to the humanities. Stories are what I like in life, and the humanities are full of them. Every history course tells me the motives behind an event, the reason things are the way they are, and (most importantly) who we are.
I once read a letter from Pliny the Younger to his best friend that started with “Hey you!”
On one hand it’s adorable to read in any context, in another it’s very much like the relationship I share with my own best friend, Rebecca. The letter is cheeky and playful and fond, everything we all are with those closest to us. To be able to understand the emotions behind a letter almost 2000 years later is something to cherish and something to marvel; we as humans are just the same as those who came before us.
Everything I read in HUST is a surprise, not so much for its content but for its ability to connect to me, Adrienne a student in the 21st century.
And that’s the point.
The Humanities don’t have a straight application to society. We can’t design robots or apply our knowledge in a way that shows physical results 100% of the time. Unlike math, when people don't understand us, they deride our field as useless, never knowing the real applications the humanities can have to humankind. The humanities gift us with something no less precious than what STEM can offer, something just as precious and useful to humanity. We learn how to think, how to empathize, and how to connect with everyone in every culture and every time. Most people see people of the past as foreign, because they do not understand the culture or the language or the ideologies. The Humanities tell me that despite those differences that superficially make us different, we still have human emotions and reactions and commonalities.
In this day and age, people search for the differences to prove that they don’t need to like someone, or to prove that they are inferior. We’ve always done this. We as a species always look for the difference in culture or ideology as proof that they are too other to be considered equal.
I disagree.
These differences are but one fraction of what makes up individuals and societies.
I don’t just see the culture, but I see what drives the culture, what drives the person and I find that those drives are the same that drive me in my individuality and my culture.
We are so divided.
Stuck in our own ideas of what makes us worthy, stuck in our own biases. We as a society can’t see the humanity in others. We don’t see the rich culture and history that influences others into their path in life; instead we only see our own.
In Humanistic Studies, stories are everywhere; people of all times become as real to me as those I pass in the streets. I can read a story written 2,000 years ago. That in itself is breathtaking. Despite that, or maybe because of that, a story so far removed from my time still resonates with what I feel and how humanity interacts with itself. The Humanities transcend time. How we express ourselves might change, but who we are stays the same. To be able to recognize that and to be able to see that borders, culture, religion don't define a person but their humanity does, is a gift the world should know.
Science is a worthy pursuit. To understand the universe through various lenses is something to cherish and grow. Humanities is much the same. We understand humans through various lenses. Be it culture, history, art, we humanistic students delve deep into the mechanisms that drive all of us, and through this we see the story that is the human story. We cannot survive as a species, as humans if we forget what exactly makes us human and what exactly has come before us to make us so.