HUMILITY PLAQUE
By:
August 27, 2025
Cross-posted from Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s story telling experiment GIVE IT UP. Earlier this month, GIVE IT UP mounted exhibitions of meaningful objects in venues around Kingston, NY… and asked the general public to help persuade the experiment’s participants to let these objects go.
HILOBROW readers, we need your help! After reading the story here, click on the response link below and share your advice with the author…
Not long before my mother died, when she had to move to assisted living, my sister and I packed up her earthly belongings. We had to decide what to dump and what to keep. And when she died, we had to divvy up what remained.
My mom loved books and liked to write, traits I inherited. I took boxes of letters and (as I recall her conceding) her not-great poems, telling myself I’d go through them some day. I kept the best of the books, along with a small wall plaque that says Ancora Imparo — supposedly a quote from Michelangelo, “I am still learning.”
I’m not sure if my mom got it as a gift, or bought it from one of the highbrow junk catalogs that perpetually filled her small mailbox off the apartment’s lobby. She displayed the plaque on her bookshelves alongside other tchotchkes, leaning it against some random book spines. I’ve displayed it for the past few years as she did, moving it aside or to another shelf when necessary. Sometimes I felt it was clutter, but I always loved the sentiment. It’s one that my mother, a life-long learner, held dear to her heart. She passed the sentiment on to her children, and I hold it no less dear to my own heart.
Today men and women possessed of dubious intelligence present themselves as clenched fists of certainty, hammering out social media posts or overhauling public policy in direct contradiction of proven facts. For that reason, I feel sending Michelangelo’s message out into the world would be a mitzvah, a good deed, so that people might be reminded to cherish learning — and by extension, teaching — and to, in the learned words of Kendrick Lamar, be humble. It’s a sentiment enshrined in ersatz bronze, cast from an original carving (according to the label), so eyes will be pulled to it. If the plaque were made of gold, maybe more who need the message would value it.
If I let it go, I hope the Ancora Imparo plaque finds a good home and does some good work. My mom would be delighted by that.
If you were in Will’s place, what would you do with the plaque? Please SUBMIT YOUR PERSUASIVE RESPONSE HERE.
All GIVE IT UP stories can be found here.