On October 11, 2001, one month after the tragedies of September 11, close to 1,000 citizens of Maine gathered in 64 sites (most of them libraries) around the state to reflect upon what had happened and to discuss with each other the impact of these events on our lives. It was the first in a series of responses on the part of the Maine Humanities Council to bring the power of the humanities to bear on how we deal with a national crisis.

In all sorts of indirect ways, the trauma of September 11 is likely to affect the discussions for a long time to come in all of the Council's programs from Winter Weekends (which this year happened to deal, appropriately enough, with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) to medicine and literature seminars to reading programs for at-risk youth.

What October 11 confirmed in Maine is that people have a deep need, in moments of crisis, simply to talk with their neighbors. The statewide meetings - entitled "Let Freedom Ring" - ranged from clusters of four or five people in small rural towns to groups of 30 or 40 in larger urban centers. Participants included high school students as well as the elderly. The groups began by concentrating on two shared texts, each of them a link with an earlier international crisis. The last stanza of Auden's "September 1, 1939" (a poem frequently mailed among friends and colleagues in the aftermath of September 11) and a passage from Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" address reminded participants that the nation had faced terrible difficulties in the not too distant past yet had prevailed.

From there the discussions moved in many different directions, guided by facilitators, many of them faculty from Maine's colleges and universities with experience in other Council reading and discussion programs. "It was fascinating and comforting to hear the wide variety of reactions to the tragic events of September 11," one participant said afterwards. "There was freedom and respect in this circle," said another. "It models what we wish for in the larger world."

This fall, the Council will sponsor a public conference as a follow up to these community discussions. The program, details of which will appear in the summer newsletter, will examine the various ways political, social, economic, constitutional - in which the world, or at least Americans' perception of it, has changed in the year since the terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, in an effort to help make sure that Americans are well informed about the non-Western world, the Council is sponsoring professional development programs for Maine teachers on the history and culture of Islam and on China and Japan (for details, please see our website, www.mainehumanities.org).

The speed and comprehensive outreach of the Council's October 11 program attracted national attention and has served as a model for other organizations. No other Maine institution pulled so many people together for such a moment of reflection, based on the shared reading of two compelling texts. One participant summed it up: "A very valuable opportunity to spread light in a sometimes dark time."