Follow
- The humanities are "always in crisis," as Douglas Bush has written, because they must, perforce, deal with original sin as well as with the highest hopes and visions of mankind . You are dealing, in short, with something as varied as human life and human experience. Hence do not despair because the humanities are not built from and through a special framework like the accumulative sciences, where step-by-step agreement is possible. You are dealing with human nature, in all its diversity, with the envies and smallness as well as its capacities for vision and for that wonderful quality, commonsense, the essence of which is to be able to keep in mind several things at once.
–Bate, Walter Jackson. “The Crisis in English Studies.” Harvard Magazine 85 (1982): 53.
Most intelligent people do occasionally ask what life is all about. Of course, this can be overdone,and we end in paralysis. Yet if English studies say that these questions are not only unanswerable but not even worth asking, they are flying the white flag of surrender.