"What it Means to Be Human"

Human beings are part of a complex species, which comes into this world with a past and history that is unknown to them in the beginning. Psychologists say that we are influenced by the concept of nature versus nurture, meaning that we evolve physically, emotionally and spiritually, based on the characteristics that our passed to us from our family's genetic code, and from the events that transpire in our lives, which shape and mold us into who we are. Ethridge Knight acknowledges this nature connection in "The Idea of Ancestry". He says "I am all of them, they are all of me", in reference to the forty-seven pictures of his family members that he keeps in the wall of his prison cell, during an eight year sentence for robbery. Li-Young Lee is a witness to the nurture aspect, as he cares for his wife's splintered hand. Young Lee, in "The Gift", says his father (a former physician for Mao Zedong) used to tell him a story "to pull the metal splinter from my palm". He describes doing this for his wife, "I bend over my wife's right hand / Watch as I lift the splinter out".

To be human is to feel pain, both physically and emotionally. Pain that is physical, for example, is the splinter in Lee's hand, "the iron sliver I thought I'd die from". Emotional pain wrenches our heart, like the speaker in Amy Lowell's poem, "The Letter", who says she is tired of "chafing my heart against the want of you". She says this after reading one of the poems she had collected from her desired love and poet, John Keats.

To be human is to feel regret, and to be bound to the places we have seen and the things that have happened in their lives. Lot's wife, for example, in the poem of the same name by Anna Akhmatova, dies because she looked back to Sodom, to the city "where sons and daughters blessed" her "marriage-bed".