And it came to pass that I went to college. There were a few weeks that last high school year when I conjectured that I might not attend, that it might be better for me to proceed directly to the life experiences that would make me a writer, instead of spending more years in classrooms.
Dad talked me into it (if that was necessary – I think now that what I said then was a form of affectation), by explaining that even if I learned nothing in class, the university would provide professors who had read ahead of me, and who could steer me away from books that would waste my time.
So I crossed the bay from Marin to Cal, entered with Honors and finished my freshman year with an average average. No surprise: I spent those quarters taking breadth requirement courses and exploring drugs, sex, politics, rock and roll. It was a fine year.
I plunged into English courses as a sophomore, and thoroughly burned myself out. The work for an English class is never over – you can always add to that essay – and taking nothing but English was like constructing a circle in Hell and moving into it.
That’s when a few of us noticed the change in the course catalogue. Unlike spoken languages, which had classes every day, Greek and Latin were usually offered MWF for an hour and a half, or TuTh for two hours. That term (fall of 1969), there was a daily Greek class. I enrolled.
It was just what I needed. Elementary language homework is objective. You do the drills, you memorize the vocab, and you’re done.
But Greek provided more than that. It wasn’t like the ambient Spanish or even temple Hebrew. Classical Greek was exotic. The alphabet was mysterious. The literature was deep.
I acquired what Cal calls proficiency (or maybe “advanced knowledge”). Nowhere near fluency, but I learned enough to struggle with Homer and make sense of Sophocles. I got to experience what it was like, a little, to think like a Greek of their golden age.
For example, we all know how lifetime is presented in our language. We use words that suggest our past is behind us and our future (teeming with possibility or otherwise) is unrolling in front of us. I was taught that’s not how you think in Greek. In that language, it’s as if you’re walking backwards through your life: the past is always before you, present in mind and memory, but you’re moving ass-first into your unseen future.
