Introduction To Humanities
Although it has been a good 10 years since I went to college, I can remember my intro humanities class like it was yesterday. Introduction to humanities was a prerequisite for pretty much all humanities majors. I thought I was a smart kid because I was such a thoroughly modern one. I didn't really want to read all of those old classics. To give you an idea about the type of course it was, it was cross listed so that classic civilization majors would have to take it to. Who read from Plato up through Dante and not that much further. To say I was skeptical of the utility of the class would be putting it mildly.
Once I started reading my introduction to humanities course work, however, my opinions changed very quickly. I had always considered myself somewhat of a philosopher, but I was amazed to find 2000 year old philosophy that was, in many ways, new to me. The ideas had been around for so long, and yet many of them were beyond my exposure And experience. In a very real sense it was my actual introduction to humanities. I had read books before, but I had no understanding about where the ideas I liked came from.
In a lot of ways, that introduction to humanities course really changed my tastes. I never became a classical civilizations nerd exactly, but I did get into a lot of older literature. After that class I took a course on Viking mythology, and absolutely loved it. We read some of the Icelandic sagas, as well as some of the earlier Germanic epics that were their precursors. It really got my imagination going, and gave me some ideas for modern stories to work on.
My humanities studies eventually leaned towards modern lit. After all, contemporary literature had been my passion since I was very young. Nonetheless, I think that that introduction to humanities course really enhanced my perspective. By knowing the roots of modern literature, I was able to bring a more intelligent and educated perspective to my reading. You can not really understand books without understanding where they come from and what preceded them. And you can't really be a good student of culture or even of society in general without understanding literature. It all goes in a spiral, and that spiral traces its origins back to the ancient Greeks and even before.
