Being Human
Readings from the President's Council on Bioethics
GPO, 628 pp., Free

MAN IS A REED, Pascal asserts, "but he is a thinking reed," and he retains a nobility that animals lack "because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this." Pascal is not among the great minds gathered in Being Human: Readings from the President's Council on Bioethics, but his famous line frames one of the central questions the volume proposes to raise: Does our humanity reside in our reasoning facility, or must a less rational, perhaps less material dimension be admitted?

Being Human is an anthology of prose and verse, beginning with ancient texts and proceeding to the present day. Comprising both fiction and nonfiction, the readings are mostly brief: stories, chapters of longer works, short poems, and selections--few more than a dozen pages long. No editor is given, but the introduction is by Leon Kass, the council's chairman, and the preface to each selection was prepared by Rachel Wildavsky.

Most of the ninety-five readings are good, and many are wonderful, even though some of the excerpts are mere snippets, which at times seem oddly trimmed. The quality of the translations is erratic. The passage chosen from the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, is from the Penguin edition, a poor translation last revised in 1972. The old Lowe-Porter rendition of Thomas Mann into English is notoriously bad, and the four selections from Homer all use the venerable translations of Richard Lattimore, although those by Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles have long superseded them.

All the readings aim us at the question of what it means to be human. Humans experience the appetites of animals--but we can think about those experiences, just as we can foresee and ponder our coming deaths. Mortality haunts all of these readings, even the love poems and short stories that celebrate children and family. "The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying," says Sir Thomas Browne in Urn-Burial (unfortunately not included here), and much of human nature may indeed reside in that apprehension of mortality which we all have, as our pets do not.

But can literature offer wisdom in the sense the volume's editors wish readers to find it? Lorrie Moore's great story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here," dramatizes a young mother's discovery that her infant has cancer. Its theme catches at our heart. A poorly written account of such an ordeal would exert faint power over us, despite the fact that the account might (unlike Moore's fiction) be true. The ability of a story or poem--or even, to a significant degree, an essay--to move us is bound up more in its rhetorical power than in the gravity of its subject or the wisdom of what it seems to be saying, a fact that nearly every reader (newly affected, say, by a fresh reading of Moore's story) finds hard to accept. A volume such as this, arranged by subject matter and prefaced by study questions, urges us to ponder the insight of great writers in a way that may lead us away from the genuine worth of the writers' contributions.