semper ubi sub ubi

I talked yesterday about wanting violins and getting Nero. Although full of Monty Python like folly, I did not get Nero exactly in last night's Latin class.

I studied Latin my senior year in high school. I took it as an elective. Yes, of all the electives I could have taken, I took Latin. I felt it was the mark of erudite education. I was 17. I went to Le Moyne to pursue a Jesuit education and continued with Latin. Magister Flavius had a passion for the language and for Wheelock's Latin. He was a tough grader but his enthusiasm was contagious. Full of myself at 19, I decided to shake the dust off of my feet and I headed to Cornell to be a Classics major.

Cornell was an experience like dropping yourself in the middle of an unknown island (perhaps the Bermuda Triangle) and trying to ascertain how to get back home. My first Latin class was with Professor Mick (he looked like a much more attractive Mick Jagger), who had a habit of rolling his own cigarettes and then consuming the butt in its entirety (not exactly attractive when I think of it). With an arrogance he could only have developed at Oxford, he asked me in my first day how I could not understand something as simple as the second declension. I got emotional and defensive. He had the look of utter confusion. I stayed on with the semester and eventually took an intermediate Latin class with him, but I lost all hope of becoming a classicist. That was a singularly bright move.

I did take a Latin reading group class at Cornell. I want to say we read Ockham. That was a delight because the Latin was easier. Medieval Latin is easier in one sense to be sure. The translating becomes less of a problem and the content becomes more of the issue. How many angels would fit on the head of a pin? It is this kind of a question that eludes my feeble brain.

I buried Latin at Cornell. Or so I thought. When I began looking at Bonaventure in translation, I noticed that all the good ones incorporated Latin in the footnotes. I realized quickly that I needed a refresher course. Fortunately, I got a hold of one such class.

I went in expecting something as serious as Professor Mick's class. Because I am a hopeless case, I did not anticipate roll call taking half of the class. I did not expect a commentary on the difference between an "authoritarian" and a "democratic" language. Nor did I expect to be told that word order matters completely not -- it easy without dictionary keep help the (see word order DOES matter). Nor did I anticipate just breezing through the actual Latin grammar with no explanation. But perhaps my favorite line summarizes the folly: when the good professor explained that "cogito ergo sum" meant "I think therefore I am", she commented that she guessed someone thought that was smart.

10 years later, I am still pursuing this folly. ME SERVA!