ABSTRACT
There is no recipe for the humanities. What matters is up for grabs and scrutiny. The archive is vast: oral to written to sonic to digital and back again. Ancient, medieval, and modern, moral, immoral, and amoral, wretched, monstrous, and sublime. The fractures, breaks, and points of departure are everywhere, yet there is something real there. The humanities are real. Humanities-based research is not always scientifically systematic or direct and the authors often do not wear name tags. The closest relatives to the humanities are the arts. The arts and humanities are relatives in the way the heart and brain are relatives. The virtues of the humanities can also become vices. They are classic, but unreliable. They can be obscene. They inspire—they can inspire awful and terrible things. They are perhaps the most inhumane deposit of ideas ever collected.
