The Point

At this point in the school year, I usually get bogged down in the mess of final exams and posting grades, preparing as much for the beginning of the next school year as I can, trying to trick myself into remembering at the beginning of September what I was thinking at the end of June. This year is different: I’m not returning to my Latin teaching job in September. Instead, I’ll be starting a doctoral program in Rhetoric and Composition. I am leaving the teaching of Latin, although not leaving Latin entirely at all, because it seems that I never can. One day this April, I found myself trying to articulate a final message to my class of seniors, trying to sum up in a few words, what the whole point of studying Latin is. I have found myself returning to the idea again and again in the last few weeks.

What is the point? You are sitting at home, on your couch, you open up the New Yorker, and there is something that reminds you of something else. There is a poem called “Daphne, After,” (years ago, it was a short story called “Demeter”) and suddenly you remember the myth, remember sitting with your head bent low over your desk, under fluorescent lights and with someone else’s voice instructing you how to translate the perfect passive participle or the indirect statement or encouraging you, half asleep, to find the chiasmus, to explain the personification or the significance of the anaphora. It’s been years since you took Latin; if someone put the original text in front of you, there’d be no chance that you would be able to translate the words or even remember what they mean.

We study, we learn the ins and outs of a language so that we can read the stories in their original form, so that we can play at translation, so that we can transform the stories from one language into another. Take away the language, take away the translation, and what are we left with? Stories. We are left with stories, and the faint feeling that we have heard of that before, the sense that we know it from somewhere, but can’t place where. I had a biology teacher who used to say that she wanted us to have heard of things. She did not expect us all to become biologists, or even to remember everything beyond the year in her class, but she wanted us to have heard of things, to have the sense that we knew what something was, to remember that we had learned about it at one point or another. With at least this kind of knowledge, we know where to look when we need to find the answer. This strikes me as a realistic approach to teaching; not everyone is going to become an expert, or major in that subject in college, or even like it at all, but there is value to learning different subjects. Remembering, but not quite placing, is an important piece of the study of Latin, the vague sense that we have seen it before. It is important because that is part of the cultural indelibility of mythology. Those stories are told again and again. Even as they change, they always come back vaguely familiar. They will never leave us; the more we know, the easier it is for us to make the connections, see the relationships. Does it matter that these stories change slightly over time? I think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the transformations of people into plants and animals and rocks. Stories change and transform, they have to, they appear slightly different at every turn. The point of learning Latin is not necessarily to become an expert in the field, it is not to never forget the meanings of vocabulary, but to remember the stories, to not let them die. No literature was ever created in a vacuum, it has always been in response to something else. How we respond to literature now is influenced by the things that we know, by what we have learned.

They tell you that you don’t really understand a subject until you teach it. I knew Latin, but I didn’t really know it until I taught it, didn’t really understand how the language worked, how it was constructed and the different patterns that made it easier and harder to understand. The more I read the texts I read every year, the more I understand the little nuances. It doesn’t necessarily make the reading of new texts any easier, I still have to wade through notes, through unfamiliar vocabulary.  

Studying Latin is about resourcefulness. It’s also about being comfortable with not knowing the answer, with wading through a murky fog of language; it’s about waiting. It’s about being stronger than you think you could be, stronger than the ease with which you can search for things on the internet, for some poorly rendered translation by someone who clearly knows more than you because they figured out whatever line you couldn’t. Strength and will power are just as important for a student of Latin as a solid understanding of the language.

Don’t we all, as teachers, wish to impart some great and memorable lesson on to the youth we teach? Don’t we all wish to come up with the perfect, catchy message for the high school seniors, those going out into the world to do what we hope are great things? Don’t we all wish to be someone that they won’t forget, because otherwise, what was the point? Why did we decide to be teachers if not to be remembered? Exegi monumentum aere perenius… (I built a monument more lasting than bronze…) Roman poets were preoccupied with being remembered, with having their writing, their art, their architecture, live on long after they were gone. The crazy thing is that my livelihood is rereading and teaching the work that these authors did not want to die with them, and it hasn’t.