The Norton Edition of this widely praised collection brings the best writings in the humanities to a college
audience. Each chapter presents a question or topic central to the human experience, among them "The Search
for Perfection," "Are We Our Bodies?," "Vulnerability and Suffering," and "Human
Dignity." To guide students as they read these influential works, every selection is prefaced by a concise
headnote and thoughtful discussion questions.
How shall we promote and protect human flourishing in a world of ever-emerging technologies? At what point should
we limit our quest for physical and mental perfection? Drawing on the insights of great thinkers throughout the
ages, Being Human: Core Readings in the Humanities can help give readers a solid understanding of what it means
to be human, both in the past and into the future. College courses, from Humanities to Bioethics to Freshman Composition,
will benefit from this important collection.
Table of Contents
SECTION I: NATURAL IMPERFECTION AND HUMAN LONGING
Chapter 1: The Search for Perfection
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birth-mark
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
Lewis Thomas, The Wonderful Mistake
Andrew M. Niccol, Gattaca
C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Richard Selzer, Imelda
Stephen Braun, The Science of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mood
Chapter 2: Scientific Aspirations
Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
René Descartes, Discourse on Method
E. O. Wilson, Naturalist
Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
Chapter 3: To Heal Sometimes, To Comfort Always
The Hippocratic Oath
The Book of Sirach
Albert Camus, The Plague
Richard Selzer, The Surgeon as Priest
W. H. Auden, The Art of Healing (In Memoriam David Protech, M.D.)
Walt Whitman, To One Shortly to Die
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Death of the Frau Consul)
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Perri Klass, Invasions
SECTION II: THE HUMAN BEING AND THE LIFE CYCLE
Chapter 4: Are We Our Bodies?
Galway Kinnell, The Fly
Plato, The Symposium
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, What the Body Knows
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Cannon Fodder and The Operating Tent)
St. Augustine, Confessions
Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric
Delmore Schwartz, The Heavy Bear
Vladimir Bukovsky, Account of Torture
Roger Angell, Late Innings
John Ciardi, Washing Your Feet
Richard Selzer, Whither Thou Goest
Thomas Lynch, Good Grief: An Undertaker's Reflections
Chapter 5: Many Stages, One Life
The Rhetoric of Aristotle
Francis Bacon, Of Youth and Age
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Young Nicholas)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Mature Nicholas)
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Thomas Buddenbrooks)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Countess Rostóva)
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Robert Louis Stevenson, Ordered South
Willa Cather, The Professor's House
Liam O'Flaherty, Life
Chapter 6: Among the Generations
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Childbirth)
George Eliot, Silas Marner
Galway Kinnell, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception
Sigrid Undset, The Mistress of Husaby
The Iliad of Homer (Meeting of Glaukos and Diomedes and Meeting of Hektor and Andromache)
Chapter 7: Why Not Immortality?
The Odyssey of Homer (Odysseus and Kalypso)
The Book of Revelation, 21:1�22:5
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book III
Francis Bacon, Of Death
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Epistles: On Meeting Death Cheerfully
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
E. E. Cummings, Two Poems
Hans Jonas, The Burden and Blessing of Mortality
Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill and Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Murasaki Shikibu, Sôku, and Dogen, Three Japanese Poems
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 12
SECTION III: LIVING WELL
Chapter 8: Vulnerability and Suffering
The Book of Job
The Iliad of Homer (Meeting of Achilleus and Priam)
William Shakespeare, King Lear
W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts
Mary Webb, Precious Bane
Francis Bacon, On Deformity
Richard Selzer, Witness
Lorrie Moore, People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babblings in Peed Onk
Flannery O'Connor, Introduction to a Memoir of Mary Ann
Chapter 9: Living Immediately
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Levin Mowing)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Child's Play
Emily Dickinson, Pain Has an Element of Blank
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature
The Odyssey of Homer (The Lotus-Eaters)
Malcolm Gladwell, Drugstore Athlete
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker
Chapter 10: Human Dignity
The Book of Genesis, 9:1-9
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, and Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
The Iliad of Homer (Achilleus Abuses the Body of Hektor)
The Histories of Herodotus
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Village Blacksmith
The Ballad of John Henry and Paul Kaplan, Henry the Accountant
John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive
Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father's Court
O. Henry, Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen
Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
