Oh the Humanities! What Do You Talk About on Your Dates? by Jude Hopkins, 10/25/25

If you read my previous post, you'll note that I bought a used library book—The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage—that was distinctive for having never been checked out. The unstamped library card was still on the inside back cover.

I recently bought another used library book, the one featured above: The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James by Laurence Bedwell Holland. It, too, is a library discard. But why? Too old? (Copyright 1964). Too esoteric? (Who reads Henry James these days. I do, but I think I'm in a minority.) Too hard? (What exactly does "expense of vision" mean?)

So I looked up the college that had discarded it and found out that it offered a few humanities degrees, but nothing in plain old English or English Lit. Situated in New England (New England! Home to Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville and Frost, to name but a few), the college offers plenty of left-brained areas of study: math, computer, marketing, gaming, business, etc. But only a few could be considered humanities-based—but always with an eye to the market. One, Digital Humanities, trains students in how to "bridge technology and human understanding" through such skills as "coding, geospatial mapping techniques and data symbolization."

Another major, Writing and Publishing, teaches students how to write and market their work "in today's media landscape." Plain old writing is offered only as a minor. Graphic Arts degrees are also tailored exclusively to today's markets. Is getting a job the only touchstone we should uphold in pursuing a college/university education?

No wonder "The Expense of Vision" was discarded from that college's library! Not that it wouldn't have done students—any students—a world of good. Vision, in Henry James's world, means the ability to look deeply into one's experiences, to develop a consciousness about our actions and the choices we make, and to deal with the consequences when we become disillusioned or disappointed or are forced to sacrifice for such an artistic sensibility. James, of course, wrote about many such people in his novels, calling them people "upon whom nothing is lost."

What Happens When the Humanities Take a Back Seat to the Job Market?

Without intertwining the humanities in a college education, everyone involved suffers. There's only so much tech our brains can handle. Several years ago, Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote an essay for the New York Times titled "The Decline and Fall of the English Major." In it, she tells us the lack of a humanities background shows in her students' writing: "They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

"Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you."

Klinkenborg wrote this before A.I. entered the scene. Imagine how this has thickened the pudding.

It's not only writing that suffers. It's also literacy. The Atlantic recently published an article titled "America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy: Declining Standards and Low Expectations are Destroying American Education." Test scores from the NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, show the majority of students at several grade levels are unable to read meaningfully. Surely this has an effect on life lived—on every level.

One of those levels involves maintaining our democracy.

Martha Nussbaum, author of the book titled Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, said in an essay titled "The End of the Humanities" in The Philosophers' Magazine, "Nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticise [sic] tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance.”

It Starts With Close Reading—And Learning to Care

We (meaning parents and teachers in particular) must hold students to higher standards. I love the idea behind a new book Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century. Authors Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant believe that making an argument based on close attention to the text is the very basis of literary study that will "make you a a better reader, thinker, and writer...."

In a recent essay for Slate titled "The Case for Whole Books," Sinykin says in order for people (that includes students) to get interested in reading a whole book, not just excerpts, they must first care about the book and its characters. He writes:

By "homing in on a detail in a text that piques one’s curiosity or puzzlement," students let their curiosity lead them. They learn to care. Then they can consider what the characters might be all about, what the text might be telling us, and how to develop an argument from their interpretation.

I thought of the multitude of details I've noticed in books that led me on: Faulkner's use of wisteria in "Absalom, Absalom!," the emphasis on Isabel Archer's overactive imagination in "The Portrait of a Lady," and the many ways it is illustrated, why the narrator of "Invisible Man" always tells how how he is dressed or how he lights his dark, underground dwelling or why Hemingway's Nick Adams in "Big, Two-Hearted River" is so deliberate in making coffee at the campground or baiting a fishing hook. The examples from the many great books I've read are too numerous—but they are there, awaiting readers to uncover them.

That brings me to the title of this post—"What Do You Talk About On Your Dates?" What in the world does that have to do with the discussion so far?

One section of college composition I once taught didn't get too excited over a poem I had just read to them in class. Before I knew a bit more about how to show them how to care about a text, I got a bit frustrated. "What do you talk about on your dates if you don't talk about a line or a phrase or an idea you've read about?"

One girl answered: "It's none of your business."

It's everyone's business, especially the business of parents and teachers. Let's raise the standards and expect more of our young people—and all people. Read better, read more, read closely. Doing so, in the words of Emily Dickinson, can take us lands away. It can make us more open, more receptive, more understanding, more aware, more curious, more alive.

More human.