Judgments about the arts: mind what you put in! Ben Jonson tells his audience how much they may assess what they see, depending on their means: It is further agreed that every person here have his or their free-will of censure, to like or dislike at their own charge, the playwright having now departed with [...]
How the humanities teach us the art of life. A professor of literature asks about life's greater meaning, which the humanities may provide. According to the author, "The humanities interrogate us. They challenge our sense of who we are, even of who our brothers and sisters might be."
Her sonnet meditates on human degradation, and self-degradation, in the new Iron Age. From "Epitaph on the Race of Man" Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea, That falls incessant on the empty shore, Most various Man, cut down to spring no more; Before his prime, even in his infancy Cut down, [...]
Why read the classics: Italo Calvino (1923-1985) explains the nature of a classical literary composition, which has various means of speaking to us throughout the different times of our lives. If the books have remained the same (even though they too change in light of a different historical perspective), we ourselves have certainly changed, and the encounter [...]
Umberto Eco explains how books, as our familial elders, deepen our emotional lives across generations. Valentino Bompiani once circulated a saying: “one person who reads is worth two.” It was said by a publisher probably as a clever slogan, but I think it means that writing (and in general language) lengthen one’s life. From the time when [...]
The ways engineering, in order to succeed, requires training in the humanities (for example, Russian literature) and vice versa!
“All the recent Spanish governments have been contemptuous of culture, but the current one is downright aggressive towards it” - Arturo Pérez Reverte
How can we learn from the writings of dead sages?
How Pushkin's poetry may be worth more than shoes.
