The Long View

The recent annual Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting took up the theme, The Humanities at Work in the World.

For the uninitiated, the humanities are those fields of human labor, knowledge, and creativity that include languages and literatures, fine and performing arts, and history (if you don’t call history a social science).

The MLA scholars pondered two questions: Do the humanities matter? How can the “mattering” be measured?

As for the first, here is an answer provided by a vice president of the Hartford Indemnity Insurance Company:

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh!  Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

(”The Idea of order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens)

As for the second, I would suggest, Not everything that can be measured is important, and not everything important can be measured.