Post #126: Ancient Greek (Ora et Labora)

10 Aug. 2024 (at Magdalen College, Oxford)

“The critic told me that I did not understand Greek. That charge has been made not unfrequently by those who have felt themselves strong in that pride-producing language. It is much to read Greek with ease, but it is not disgraceful to be unable to do so. To pretend to read it without being able—that is disgraceful.”

—Anthony Trollope, Autobiography, ch. xi

     It’s a gorgeous place, Oxford—my college particularly—and whatever my (abundant) frustrations have been at various times, I am once more overwhelmed, on a quick twenty-four hour visit, how lucky I was to get a chance to spend such an impressionable part of my youth here (something I’ve discussed in a more melancholy vein in #101). To give it all the right note of authenticity, I am finishing my text while sitting in the shabby old college pub, rowing oars on the walls, sub-70s furniture all around (including the decidedly sticky table right before me), and a centuries-old vapor of stale beer…

     Ancient Greek is likewise a beautiful language, and, equally, not an easy proposition, either in the strictly linguistic sense or in broader terms*—the human factor being generally the decisive one, I’ve found in life. The parallels between the two make it seem only too fitting that I should have consumed my long-awaited tryst with the Greek at a two-week boot camp in the English countryside, near Salisbury (hence the postcard I sent in #125), and in very particular company, as I shall be explaining.** It seems apt too that to round it all off at the end, I should have headed to Oxford and paid my respects to my alma mater thirty years exactly after I ran off, practically screaming and not inclined to look back, upon completing my final examinations.***

     How did it happen that so committed a one-time champion of the modern languages (as against the ancient: I devoted a good portion of my high school valedictorian speech to the theme, something that my Latin teacher, with whom my relations had been strained at the best of times, took very much amiss) would find himself performing such an about-turn? Well, it’s been said that the head is round so that one’s thinking can change direction; and I began realizing, when I first read Plato and Aristotle a few years into graduate school—at a friend’s house on the beach in Chalkidiki—that I had missed something important…

     Before long I was teaching ancient philosophy in my classes and beginning to feel with corresponding urgency my own deficiencies when it came to traditional learning and ancient history. So I started reading up, bit by bit, on my Greek and Roman history, until eventually I was ready to concede that perhaps the students of the Classics that I had once mocked as throwbacks and pimpled snobs were on to something after all, even if they were in most cases merely treading the established tracks of social prestige in circles that were far from my own.

     All this kept percolating over the years until, a little over a decade ago, while I was teaching at a particularly tony liberal arts college in upstate New York (the one with the airport in the middle of nowhere for parents flying in with private jets: I mentioned it briefly in #4), I had an opportunity to benefit from their excellent Classics program (yes, in the United States, ye naysayers of little faith) and audit an introductory Greek course. Given that I was teaching full-time, making it to class every morning, five days a week, was as much as I could manage; following along with the copious homework assignments was beyond my powers, so I could keep up only very partially. But I did not miss a class for the whole term, and even persisted a few weeks into the next before I threw in the towel and declared myself defeated by the Greek verb and its countless intricacies and complications.

     Soon after, when my three-year contract at the airport college expired, my career-path, if it can be called that (it always looked more of a labyrinth to me) took some even deadlier twists and turns—words I choose as a salute to Odysseus, that seasoned survivor of shipwrecks, that great exponent of the art of very nearly drowning again and again, though never quite. My agitations about the Greek had to take a back seat for a number of years to more pressing demands of survival, and I became an English teacher—first in Barcelona, then in Bhutan and Thailand—before a few more throws of life’s mysterious dice restored me, almost miraculously (and with the help of some sympathetic individuals whose graciousness shall not be forgotten), more or less to where I had left off years before. Even more marvelously, with the water still up to my neck though no longer over my head, the creaky old academic-writing engine came back to life and I was able to publish again, this time with an even stronger pull towards ancient thought and history (Plutarch especially), until eventually I found myself in the peculiar position of having become modestly well-published in the field despite my paltry Greek.

     I felt keenly, however, that this linguistic nakedness called for more decent covering—a loincloth, let’s say, instead of the mere fig-leaf I had acquired by auditing—not so much because the kind of work I had been engaging in absolutely required proficient Greek (quality renditions for the primary sources being considerably easier to obtain than translations of classic secondary literature in German and French, for example, to name just the most obvious), but more as a matter of scholarly honor. Recalling just how daunting my earlier encounter with the Greek verb had been, however, it was also clear that I had better get to it soon, lest my remaining mnemonic faculties fail me and I miss the last boat to Ithaca.

     The occasion that forced the issues was provided by a call, at my current college, for funding proposals that would enhance relevant skills, with no further specifications provided. Given my relatively prestigious publications in the field, I imagined, in my innocence, that the case for a short, modestly-priced Greek course in the Classics heartland was pretty unassailable. I turned out to be mistaken in that naïve confidence (“not relevant to your teaching” was the verdict—this despite the fact that I do cover some ancient philosophy in my classes and a bit of Roman history as well), but by the time I was thus disabused of my illusions, I had already applied for a spot on the course and had been accepted. When I told the organizers that my hopes of support from my home institution had been cruelly dashed, they generously offered to waive half my fees. I now stood before an existential fork in the road: should I cancel and give up on the idea of ever learning Greek more properly, or should I scrape together what mental and material reserves I could muster, even knowing that such a European summer would strain my resources to the limit, in every sense?

     With a heavy heart, let me admit it freely, I decided to jump, telling myself that if I did not find it in me to get the thing done now, I probably never would. Do or die, as they say. So I arranged my summer plans around the course, screwed up my courage, ignored my raw nerves as much as I could, and headed back to the school bench for beginner’s lessons alongside a bunch of teenagers with Classical aspirations, in a setting that could not have been better designed to stir up the cauldron of unresolved, and lately resurgent, issues from my earlier Island adventures at Oxford, a full generation ago. In the ensuing classroom encounter between Gen-X and Gen-Z, there was little meeting of minds, I am afraid—or rather, none at all.† If I understood well enough before that I was facing a major generational gap (#83), I now realized that it was even greater than I had imagined—a veritable chasm, the size of the Grand Canyon, with a river running through.††

     What was more, not only did I find the British way every bit as hard to negotiate as before (this in addition to the generational incompatibilities), the Greek also proved to be just as grueling as expected, with the element of surprise coming mostly from just how much of a fight it turned out I was able and willing to put up. Having one’s back against the wall is neither comfortable nor enjoyable; but it will reveal something about the state of one’s inner stuff, for better or for worse.

     Rarely in my life have I worked so hard (all day, to exhaustion, and to the exclusion of all else) on something that was coming to me only with the greatest difficulty—and this against a background discomfort with the social dynamics that was not for the faint of heart, at a time when my general confidence was not running very high, to put it mildly (as intimated in #124). Not to belabor the matter, within forty-eight hours, by the evening of the second day of classes, I was feeling utterly defeated and sensed myself on the verge of going into a tailspin.

     At my moment of crisis, something dawned on me (thanks be to Buddha): I realized that at this juncture I had an option not available to me when I was an Oxford undergraduate so many years ago. With the entrenched habits of dozens of meditation retreats behind me, what was to stop me from continuing the course as if it were one of them—following a strict schedule, limiting my social interactions to the unavoidable minimum (the alternatives to which were anyway not looking very heartening), and dealing with the inevitable bumps in the road as so many instances of the Eight Vicissitudes (#16)? In other words, I could reverse my orientation and, instead of paying attention to what was going on around me, turn inward for my refuge from all the swirling craziness, my own included.

     Such a monkish turn, had it occurred to me at nineteen (which it certainly did not), might have been quite in keeping with the old ways of my alma mater as well (“The Lord is my light” proclaims the university motto), and even with the traditions of my erstwhile college (which boasts one of the most beautiful cloisters and college chapels in the world). These venerable traditions are much-abated, however, and of merely antiquarian interest at the Oxford I’ve known. As a young man, at any rate, I had no sense whatsoever of the liberating power of combining a strict work routine with an equally determined regimen of inward meditations. Ora et labora, one might say—commonly associated in Christian lands with the rule of St. Benedict, though the method behind the formula can hardly be considered the property of any one tradition. And sure enough, whenever in the course of the ensuing dozen days I recalled to my mind what I had resolved to do and I acted accordingly, I could swim the waves safely; only when I lost sight of my resolution did I founder and start sinking again, until I recollected myself once more.

     It is quite remarkable, really, with what sureness of instinct I had managed to maneuver myself, at the height of my mid-life crisis of confidence, into just the kind of complicated stew about which, as an undergraduate, I had such misgivings and bitter memories. (I hasten to add, for the record, that it was never the black-tie and Brideshead Revisited dimension that disturbed me, quite the contrary; of that aspect I could not get enough; only it was in desperately short supply beside the beer-chips-and-telly side of things.) I should say too that neither then nor now have I ever wavered in my gratitude towards those who gave me such a unique opportunity in life—whether at Oxford or at my Greek camp. It is not ingratitude to be wretched on account of uncongenial social modes and mores that make one feel out of place, nor any more than a statement of fact to say so, un-English as it may be.

     What is more, a miserable thing to be doing need not be a deplorable thing to have done, and in certain noteworthy instances might be just the opposite—something I’ve often thought might connect the Oxford experience, though very remotely, with what one might undergo at various military academies, say. Perhaps the analogy even stretches, more remotely still, as far as connecting my commodious boot camp in Ancient Greek with its more martial equivalents elsewhere. I certainly wore out my equipment, and it didn’t take eight weeks either.

     Nor would it be at all out of keeping with Greek thought (their tragedies in particular) to believe that one can learn a great deal—perhaps most of all—not only despite suffering bitterly along the way, whether in a particular setting or in the world at large, but precisely from that suffering. Much as one might wish for the journey to be a little more pleasant, the recognition may not be far off that the price of growth and wisdom in our world does so often turn out to be nothing other than discomfort and displeasure, or outright misery along the way. Such is life in this vale of tears, these never-ending rounds of Samsara…

     We would do well to remember, whether in our joys or our plights, that it is, after all, only a passing show we are witnessing, more to be smiled than frowned or cried at, whenever possible. (That there is cause for bitter tears in this life too, I would be the last to deny; but that is not what I am concerned about here.) As Pindar puts it in his Pythian Odes (line 8.95 ff):

ἐπάμεροι· τί δέ τις; τί δ᾿ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος.

[Creatures of a day! What is someone? What is no one? A dream of a shadow is man.]

     As Trollope says in the epigraph, it is not disgraceful if one cannot read Greek, or even see the point of learning to do so. At the same time, to be able to follow Pindar’s lines in the original, or those at the outset of the Book of John, which I did for a self-set test and a treat on the morning of my “discharge,” is a delight that those who have not put themselves through this particular grind (if only for two weeks) may never know…

καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.

     The light shines in the darkness—straightforward so far, a plain present tense, a nominative, and an object in the accusative. Then in the final word, an unexpected treat for the beginner, only a little disguised: an old friend from his early lessons, λαμβάνω! Perhaps with a little help, and almost certainly with a rush of gratification, one might see that κατέλαβεν merely adds a prefix and puts the verb in the Aorist.

     Next one may recall, from a less exam-driven setting that left a little more room for deeper reflections, how this subtle tense, the Aorist, is not only concerned with past events, but more strictly with the facts to which they give rise—meaning that it can also be used gnomically, to express timeless truths. All of which may be a little high for a beginner to be reaching, but at least it begins to clear up what looks at first sight like a rather inexplicable confusion of tenses, or even an unlikely corruption in so central a passage. Instead, the now modestly seasoned beginner may affirm with renewed confidence that the darkness not only did not, on a particularly salient occasion, fail to snuff out the light, but that it also more generally does not (and perhaps even cannot) overcome the little light that keeps shining despite everything.

     (For Sarah, my Greek tutor, who was lovely and did a great job. Thank you!)

*It makes for melancholy musings, even from the relatively safety of adulthood, to consider how so beautiful a language would have served sadistic classroom pedants over the ages as the perfect instrument of torture in their dealings with captive schoolchildren. It is as if the intricacies of the idiom—the verbs in particular—had been deliberately designed to trap and trip up the unwary at every turn, and to leave even the most earnest students as few dependable hiding places and refuges as possible, hence exposing the youth of the past almost inescapably to the chastising rod. From the somber perspective of the cushionless school bench, alas, to say nothing of even harder church pews regimented with even longer sticks, Classical Greek can look a beast that is all the more terrifying for being clothed in talk of truth, beauty, and love. Good-bye to all that. Some things really have improved, even if it has meant far fewer students being exposed to “the language of the gods.” It remains true, from my perspective as well, that enough lastingly worthwhile things have been said in ancient Greek to make it a potential gold mine for the mind; but mining has ever been a most hazardous and costly profession—so much so, in ancient times, that it meant the equivalent of a death sentence.

**What proved so disconcerting about the crowd was how they looked even more sifted and skewed to me than what I had experienced, rather painfully, in my undergraduate days. Take an exchange that occurred about half-way through, when someone asked me whether or not I was a classicist “by qualification” (a rather nice turn of phrase, I thought). For once I could answer without hesitation, despite the mined harbor that is Englishness at such moments: certainly not, but only a classicist by interest. At which point a friendly fellow student (of which there were not many, from my perspective at least) added on my behalf that while I could not, it was true, be called a classicist proper, at least I had pursued “the other” course of study most acceptable to that particular set. Meaning PPE—Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. What Cambridge is to Oxford, one might say, PPE (or “Modern Greats”) is to Classics (the original). Then as now, I did not belong at all; and yet I did, in all my discomfort, for life. Such, such were the joys…

***To this day, the most the university will officially acknowledge is that it appears I completed my degree. Since many fondly (or fiercely, or formidably) remembered former students never deigned to take their examinations at all, but quietly disappeared and were thought of no less for it, I am not unduly worried that my standing is in any great jeopardy. Apparently, by the official records, all students there are only fleeting appearances. And indeed I find myself agreeing that the living bodies in residence, such as they are, should be considered largely dispensable and that what beauty is to be found at Oxford has settled mostly upon the stones—when they are not torn out in specious acts of vandalism from on high, see below (see #101, including the postscript).

†Not only is there the towering divide between those who were still raised on the weightiness of books and those who grew up on the airiness of the ether (#83), there is also the question of role models. Most of mine were boomers, that is to say, beatniks and hippies, or else stalwarts of the preceding war-generations. The arrogance of youth may be a human universal, to a point; but there was not, I think, the same navel-gazing self-importance in mine that so characterizes these precious little post-millennial pups, who seem to care about nothing so much as looking in the mirror of other minds made to their own diminutive dimensions. What I recall most vividly from my own younger years is how urgently I wanted to be an adult; this lot seem to wish for nothing so much as to preserve their frightfully herd-minded immaturity as long as possible. They feel old at 20, apparently, not free at last from the strings of childhood—and in this infantilizing mode they meet with much encouragement from elders who, on pretense of protecting the vulnerable, have their own reasons for wishing to see children in them, not young adults. In other words, a group-thinking, new-speaking generation of Peter Pans—fairyish and smug, narcissistic, bloodless, and lightweight. Only the obsession with getting rich kicks in early, alongside a collective compulsion to silence and censure others, thus vitiating any residual charms for which the shocking shallowness and immaturity might otherwise leave room. Granted, no group, let alone one as vast as an entire generation (if there even is such a thing), will ever be as homogeneous within as it perhaps appears from the outside; but this summer they had me fooled.

††What is it, for the love of Britannia, with the horrid clapping and hooting that seems to have taken hold even of unjolly Old England and its unheated “public” boarding schools? I thought such vulgar displays were not meant to cross the Channel or the Big Sea. Done to show support, I am told with the same frantic urgency as the maniacal applause itself, as if I were hard of hearing. To this I answer that there was once a Britain—never mine, but a force to be reckoned with in the world—that considered such noisy spectacles beneath contempt because it was understood that every man would do his duty. Even in the navy and merchant marine as Joseph Conrad still knew it (“Well Done,” 1918), the highest commendation required a mere two words: well done. That was a long time ago, it will be said. My point exactly: an unrecognizably long time. I am very glad that the blood sacrifices of the past are, for now at least, no longer required of most of us; but standing ovations for trifling accomplishments are no substitute for paying one’s dues in more substantial currencies, while basking in the warmth of a herd that demands little more of its sheep than profligate participation in rituals of self-congratulations and mutual flattery is not my idea of human dignity any more than it would have been Nelson’s or Conrad’s. The bill, please; I’m ready to check out.