LOTUS @Penn - Readings

What we are Reading THIS YEAR

2023

Readings

Documentaries

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to tell that. I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are."

— James Baldwin, Life Magazine, May 24, 1963

"I want to appeal to the past in order to explain the present. I know how unpopular this method is. What have we moderns, we wisest of the wise, to do with the dead past? Yet, ‘All that read the globe, are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom,” and who are we, stupid blunderers at the tasks these brothers sought to do — who are we to forget them?

I remember once offering to an editor an article which began with a reference to the experience of the last century. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘leave out the history and come to the present.’ I felt like going to him over a thousand miles and taking him by the lapels and saying, ‘Dear, dear jackass! Don’t you understand that the past is the present; that without what was, nothing is? That, of the infinite dead, the living are but unimportant bits?"

— W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa

"We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate."

"Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction."

— Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.