T H E   H U M A N I T Y   E S S A Y

A challenge to extend the frontiers of interactive knowledge from Emil Constantinescu, President of Romania.

Tutored in politics by Corneliu Coposu, one of Romania's most famous dissidents, Constantinescu now faces the challenge of resuscitating a country emerging from thirty years of Communist control. With his dramatic victory in November of 1996, he is the first Romanian to become President as the result of a peaceful democratic election.

"In this new era of visual and electronic information, we are perhaps rediscovering the old virtue of direct human contact...There may be societies deprived of oil, of water, but there is no society deprived of information which may be useful to others. Who can tell whether the hunting techniques of Aboriginal communities or the knowledge of African medicine-men will not be as precious tomorrow as our present technological skills are today?..."

Previous humanity essayists include His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi.

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La Violencia
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Photography by Derrill Bazzy

In images of silence and endurance, Derrill Bazzy evinces intimate moments of a population in resistance.

While an emergency aid worker, Derrill documented Guatemalans surviving a 36-year civil war -- which ended in December 1996 and left more than 100,000 people dead. An American living in Aquinnah, Massachusetts, Derrill works to support indigenous organizations.

"For two and a half nights we hiked into the Ixcan rain forest, through the pitch black and the mud, always silent, always listening...One morning at the roll call for men, I asked one of the Civil Patrol what would happen if someone wasn't there. 'Soy tumba' was the answer 'I am the tomb'..."

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"And if it goes, it's gone, it's gone. . ."
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N A T U R E

Colombian environmental activist Juan Mayr voices the continuing struggle for consonance between people and land.

A recipient of The Goldman Prize, Juan Mayr has worked for eighteen years to preserve the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a mountain range in northern Colombia. Juan is one of the very few outsiders the Kogi, an indigenous people inhabiting the upper reaches of the Sierra Nevada, have allowed into their home.

"The Kogi look at us outsiders as tiny brothers. You can be president, you can be guerrilla chief, you can be an anthropologist. You are still a tiny brother. . .One of the main Mamas (high priests) accepted me as one of his sons, and his wife made me a mochilas with the signs of the Mama. And I was invited to come in their ceremonies. Nobody's allowed from the white world to come into the ceremonies..."

The Sierra is the heart.
Other mountains are knees and elbows, but here is the heart.
You can't cut down the Sierra,
because when the heart gets sick, everything gets sick.

(from the Declaration of the Mamas, given to Juan Mayr)

humanity uses eight headings as editorial guides: nature, culture, communication, force, leadership, faith, love, and chance. These are not meant to be absolute categories, clearly defining each area of investigation; rather they are designed for convenience, stimulation, ease of access, continuity and familiarity.

Nature covers topics about our natural environment, our home, the stage.

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Urgency and Harmony
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Sultan Bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud reflects on his journey from desert to sky.

The Koran exhorts the faithful to observe the stars and planets, but few Muslims have come as close to touching them as Prince Sultan bin Salman. He was aboard the space shuttle Discovery's June 1985 flight, which launched a satellite designed to improve communications among 22 Arab countries.

"When I was a boy, I went into the desert many miles from the nearest town. At night the only sound was the wind and the only light from the sky... For all children, the stars, the moon, the planets hold great mystery. We see the same face of the moon. We watch constellations move. We look as far as we can see and wonder what lies beyond..."

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Eko o gba beyan rara o
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D I A L O G U E

Twenty-two year old Hafsat Abiola is the President of the National Pro-Democracy Movement of Nigeria. She speaks in enlightened terms about her family's political sacrifice. "We are responsible for the people in Nigeria. In a sense, we are their servants."

Recently graduated from college, Hafsat now raises her four younger brothers and sisters in Washington, D.C. We asked her to respond to Anouk Russell's and Yermolai Solzhenitsyn's correspondence in our premier issue.

"Dear Yermolai,...I was saddened to read your reflections on present day Russia, perhaps because they hit too close to the tragedy of my country and the suffering of so many...

...There is a distance between facts and truth, but acquiring the first is the means to the second. Of course with me, I would be happy dwelling on the first task, pretending a concern for universal truths by fruitless pontificating. I enjoy that; it demands little and is so divorced from action. This is perhaps why I am in a hurry to return to school, to lock myself in a room full of books, walk on red-brick paths in the steps of many great thinkers, sauntering from seminar to conference to discuss the issues of our day. That, in fact, was the plan, until my father's political yearnings threw my family into the center of one of the biggest crises Nigeria has ever faced. And since very little will be gained without struggle, thank goodness such an experience wakes you up..."

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Insight
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Photography by Harold Feinstein

Harold Feinstein reveals the sculpture of Rodin.

A Brooklyn photographer, Fienstein learned that French master sculptor Auguste Rodin was nearsighted, and so worked only inches from the stone. He seeks to recreate this intimacy in his photographs. A 1914 letter from Rodin's close friend and secretary, Rainer Maria Rilke, adds insight.

"...what I mean is to let yourself precisely into the dog's center, the point from which it begins to be a dog, the place in it where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment..."

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Ceremony for the Ages
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A North American, Ben Stott and a Brazilian, Andrea Alcici are joined by marriage on the shores of Turnagain Arm in Indian, Alaska. Ben and Andrea are acupuncturists in Oregon. They share with us the ceremony they wrote for their marriage.

"There is a deep longing in all of us to find our way back to that state of wholeness and bliss from which we emerged. Marriage is a profound and transformative ritual in our collective consciousness. It symbolizes the possibility of that reunion, or a return to a sense of completeness..."

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"...castaways in holed crafts..."
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P O E T R Y

Exiled Nigerian Wole Soyinka laments children of severance. A poet, playwright, and novelist, Professor Soyinka is also one of his country's most prominent dissidents. In exile from Nigeria since 1994, Soyinka is now teaching, lecturing "and still politicking" as Woodruff Professor of Arts at Emory University in the United States.

"...Where love is a hidden, ancient ruin, crushed
By memory, in this present
Robbed of presence..."

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We are not that funny
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Animal delegate Andrei Codrescu (and his cat) pass along some observations from our fellow creatures.

A social commentator and humorist, Andrei's New Year's resolution was to "watch more TV, so I'll know what people are talking about when they talk, and what my students are saying when they are saying things." He continued, "I also decided to change my mind about everything I've been sure about last year."

Born in Transylvania, Romania in 1946, he emigrated to the United States at age twenty. Of his homeland, he writes, "Romanians, like other people under the merciless gun of history, have never put their faith in big official buildings where the power of the day resided. They preferred instead to stay close to the earth and to make their own statements about the purpose of space."

Andrei is a professor of "English and Sedition" at Louisiana State University.

"...Secondly, animals laugh at our mating habits. To them, we look ridiculous scurrying to charm one another with inedible things (most animals consider chocolates inedible) and then, after we conquer each other, sneaking out and conquering others behind the backs of our conquests...Many animals like to roll in the flowers, too, but they certainly don't stop to read books about mating..."