Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::September 24, 2001

Worth repeating

The public lecture by Marjorie Agosín, Center for Humanities and Arts visiting scholar in the Romance languages department, was postponed from Sept. 11 to Sept. 13 as a result of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. She began by pointing to the connection between those events and the text she had originally prepared:
“I realized more than ever the importance of literature, the importance of being a witness, the importance of engaging. . . . When you become vulnerable, you become more compassionate, you become more human. . . .
“Ever since the beginning of time, poetry and the spoken word has been the pulse of civilization. . . . To write is also to bear witness. . . . Our writing not only depicted our world but allowed for the possibility of symbolic thinking . . . and thus metaphor and the possibility of seeing what could be. . . .
“All acts of writing are acts of retrieval in the house of language. . . . I would like to emphasize that writing does not necessarily redeem the world, or turn the horrific into beauty, but . . . it allows us to remember, to recapture the innocence of the world as we knew it. . . . To remember, and to engage in the acts of memory, is to be a moral person. Writing allows us to find a space in the world and to be understood.”

--Beth Roberts

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