I've been thinking a great deal about the relation between music and poetry for an essay I want to write with the title "What Claudio Knew:  Teaching Receptivity."  Claudio is Claudio Rodríguez, by consensus the greatest Spanish poet of the second half of the twentieth century.

Almost all efforts to foster receptivity in general run into the problem of exclusionary thinking, of dichotomizing, of policing the boundary between what we should be receptive to and what we shouldn't.  For example, I want to say, "be open to everything," but then why does my blood boil when the Humanities lecture is announced and it's Mary Oliver?

My approach to the set of fields known as the Humanities is rather different from that of most people I know.  I hesitate to assert the universal validity of my approach because it is, basically, a desire for everyone else to become more like me.