Nothing--And Everything

The great French writer and cultural historian Andrew Malraux once remarked that a human life is worth everything and nothing. I think the same way about the humanities and social sciences. Poetry? novels? short stories? investigations of the lives of rain forest Indians? What do these amount to? Among the truly unlearned, not much. But even to those who have everything--money, success, achievements beyond the ordinary--life means nothing without great art, the music in your head of great poems, and turning the pages at night under a narrow but bright lamp glow of a novel that takes you in and makes you feel alive in a way that on your own you can never achieve. This is what our ancestors gave to us, this is what we live with, this is what we hope to pass along--this light, this lamp glow in the heavy dark.
Nothing--and everything!