Literature is the song of our common humanity sung throughout time by thousands of brilliant voices. It is an inquiry into the nature of life, seen through the incandescent lens of language. It is the poetic, dramatic, eternal tale of our common existence. To choose the study of literature is to choose to expand one’s awareness, to perceptually experience what life is and what human beings are capable. Literature chronicles the history of human trials, and more significantly human triumphs — those victories that transcend our physical, mental, and spiritual limitations. Literature is our window into life’s most compelling truths. It knits the world together into one inseparable family. It is “the news that stays the news,” said Ezra Pound.

To study literature we must be explorers of the imagination. We must love truth, and we must love beauty — which amount to the same thing says John Keats, and both of which literature supplies in abundance. We must also love language, or at least be willing to love it; for language is the writers’ pallet with all its hues to paint the human spirit. Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, and Alice Walker are among that fraternity of writers who are our eyes into what is joyful, cosmic, beautiful and worthy of intellectual pursuit.

Literary studies at Maharishi University of Management fulfills the goals of the best liberal arts programs, but it offers a much wider vision elsewhere unparalleled. It provides an opportunity for students to be world citizens in the effort to create a sustainable future for the Earth. A sustainable culture is a culture that does not allow suffering, war, or stress in the lives of humans or the environment. This is the long-cherished desire by all the right-thinking people who have ever lived, and Maharishi’s revival of ancient Vedic knowledge has transformed this ideal of a sustainable culture into an attainable reality.