Humanity was Here

Maybe you’re someone who always wears sneakers. 

Try on a shiny red heel. Walk around in it for a bit. Uncomfortable? Yeah. Feels awkward, maybe? Well, it’s not your shoe, so that’s okay — you don’t have to keep it on. But you did it. Now you know something about the way it chafes your Achilles tendon, or slides around in foot sweat after a few blocks, or teeters when you hop off the curb. There is now one more experience that maybe you can understand a little better. 

That’s empathy. That’s at the core of the humanities. And it’s the heart of my major, English. 

I was surprised when my professor in my English 302: Critical Practice class last winter — a cornerstone of the UW’s English program — asked us to vent. What had some people said to us when we told them we were English majors? How had they resigned us to a category below their own in just a split second? My friend and I looked at each other dubiously. We were sardonic– we knew what people thought of our major! And it was fine. We’d been artists our whole lives and had always been judged, doubted to some extent for our interests, our passions, which, to many, weren’t valuable ones. We grew up and got over it.

But the truth was, as people in the classroom raised their hands, I had to admit it did hurt to have people think your degree is useless, or chosen on a whim because you weren’t smart or driven enough to be an engineer. Hey, shoutout to engineers, but my brain doesn’t work that way. Why would I do it? No one expects you guys to be poets, so why expect the opposite? My whole life, it’s been that way. In grade school, we’d maybe get one week of creative writing in English class, if I was lucky. But I had to take math every year for twelve years! An unending sorrow.

The study of English matters in the context of our world, in the context of all of us. It’s not just the study of books, but the study of thought. For me, words have always been everything, because of how they make me think. I love how with any written work, from prose to poetry, you get to prod around a new brain and scoop a soft heap of seeds from the unique fruit it came from. You’ll squint against the sun through a different brow, shake out pins and needles of foreign limbs. You get this miraculous chance to do the undoable: experience the world from the perspective of another mind, body and being. 

I was typing up an essay last spring quarter near friends who were finishing up a neuroscience final–lots of data to go through. One of them leaned over the table at me: “If you just used Chat GPT, you’d see how easy it is to be an English major.” O.K., ha-ha, funny. But many people truly do think this of a humanities degree. .When I saw that The UW bookstore sells “At Least You’re Not An English Major!” as a grad gift at checkout, I remembered the neuroscience student’s half-joke: My computer can write for me. Why would anyone study English? And, again: what’s the point of that? 

The point is humanity. The point is not forgetting ourselves. We didn’t just name the humanities after us because it’s catchy. The humanities are an inquiry and exploration, a criticism and a celebration of human-ness.  The humanities teach critical thought. There’s no million-dollar question, and there is no right or wrong answer to it. When you read other peoples’ work, when you go on to create your own, you recognize how others view the world while building up your own convictions. You learn how to express and defend your ideas, how to communicate, how to care. Whatever you end up doing with the degree, you’ll have a foundation of hearing and considering others, of forming and putting words to your own opinions. You’ll be able to consider the world spread out in front of you with both unshakeable empathy and sharp-eyed criticism.

Our new age is marked by the inundation of information, and the sheer volume of it has contributed to an increasingly polarized world. It’s understandable. The information launched at us is inescapable, overwhelming, enough to consume you if you let it. But one thing is clear: we should not follow blindly. We must go into the maelstrom, and we must do so with minds that are capable of criticism and compassion. Literature is a huge part of this. Books have long worked as vessels of satire, of commentary and empathy. 

Our world would be bleak without the arts, without literature, without our passion for each other and for humanity. Why else would some of the first humans have smeared stick figures on cave walls, if not in part to connect and, in connecting, to understand? Humans have always held a certain angst: we have always sought to understand what we cannot fathom. Death and what comes after, our purpose, the existence or nonexistence of something behind the curtain, beyond our grasp; arts and the humanities have always been an expression of this, with reading and writing being no exception. 

There’s no question that we will leave a mark. One that will be indicative of this era, our generation and ourselves. Like the smears in the cave, it will be miraculous and ordinary in its declaration to the next of us, humanity was here. So, the question is, what kind of mark do we want to leave?

Piper Sorensen is a University of Washington senior majoring in English.