Living with a Dead Language

by Ann Patty

  As David Hartwell, the top science-fiction editor of my era, once explained, “The reason for all the conventions is because science fiction attracts people who don’t fit in anywhere, so they like to imagine their own worlds. They can choose their own reality and find others equally passionate about it, and the only requirement for entry is enthusiasm.” Wasn’t that a fairly accurate description of Latinists?

  Emboldened by Jason’s welcome, I contacted Stephen Haff at Still Waters in a Storm. I’d told him about the Living Latin weekend, which he would have very much liked to attend but he couldn’t afford the fee. I decided that if Jason wanted me to come for free, he would want Stephen even more, so I put the two together via e-mail.

  Three days before the seminar, I received an e-mail from Curtis, who had seen my name on the list of attendees. He would be teaching there. What luck! I would know someone!

  Two days before the seminar, the snow began upstate, heavy and relentless. It continued all day and all night. By the time the storm abated, thirty-six hours later, it had dropped three feet of snow. For the next day George and I, housebound, listened hopefully for the sound of the snowplow coming up our long driveway. It did not come. I was supposed to be in New York City already, but there was no way I could even get down the driveway. George had ventured out a few times on his snowshoes, first to clear a path for Augie, who, after looking warily at the wall of snow he had to step into, finally did, only to sink like a stone. George had to shovel in three layers, a foot at a time. We surmised the plows had to do the same, which was why they were taking so long.

  Stephen had e-mailed saying he was planning to meet me at the conference with four of the kids. Snow doesn’t stop the city for more than a few hours. Up here it can stop us for days. Finally, at 2:00 A.M. Saturday, the snowplows arrived. It took two hours, thrice as long as usual, for them to plow from our garage to the road. Finally the path was clear, and I caught the 7:00 A.M. train into the city.

  I always take a seat on the west side of the train, so I can watch the river. That morning the Hudson was completely blanketed by snow; even the line of the shipping channel, a narrow ribbon for navigation kept open by an icebreaker, was clogged by snow-covered ice floes. Just below Poughkeepsie, I spotted a trio of coyotes walking single file on the frozen river from shore to island. Half an hour later, by the time we’d passed Croton-on-Hudson, the river was water again, glinting through jagged sheets of ice atop which raptors sat. I spotted three bald eagles, patron bird of George. Just before reaching Manhattan, the Hudson was flowing freely, teeming with barges rather than birds.

  I disembarked and tromped through the already dirty, slushy snow to the Lincoln Center Campus of Fordham University, where the conference was being held. I arrived just at nine, and the place was already abuzz with activity: The attendees were recognizably classicists, most of them thin, young men. I later spotted two other elders; both turned out to be newly retired lawyers who had been Latin majors in college and were now working toward teacher certification. Everyone there, sixty in all, was either a graduate student or a teacher. I was the only exception. Now I understood why Jason so wanted me to come.

  I heard the mostly incomprehensible hum of Latin being spoken all around me, which sounded a lot like Italian. Jason Pedicone recognized me and came up to introduce himself. A tall, thin, thirtysomething man with a Gladwellian nimbus (Latin nimbus, cloud) of strawberry-blond hair, he welcomed me in English and assured me that the seminars were tracked by level and I would be fine. He was quickly whisked away by a Latin speaker, and I found a place among those seated awaiting the beginning of the session.

  One latecomer made a remarkable entrance: He was wearing a bristling bearskin coat, large galumphing boots, and looked like Davy Crockett. As he slowly shed layer after layer of outer garment, many of the participants gathered around him, greeting him in Latin. Finally he emerged, another tall, skinny man in his thirties. He looked like a grown-up Siddhi and exuded the same sexy aura, though his style was more mountain man than Goth.

  Soon Jason stepped up to the podium and welcomed us first in Latin, then in English. He began with a poem by Yeats, which was projected on the screen behind him:

  The Scholars

  Bald heads forgetful of their sins,

  Old, learned, respectable bald heads

  Edit and annotate the lines

  That young men, tossing on their beds,

  Rhymed out in love’s despair

  To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

  All shuffle there; all cough in ink;

  All wear the carpet with their shoes;

  All think what other people think;

  All know the man their neighbour knows.

  Lord, what would they say

  Did their Catullus walk that way?

  “Here we prefer to walk like Catullus,” he assured us, as he smoothed his receding hairline, “even if we’re going bald.”

  Most of the heavies of the Living Latin movement were in attendance. Terence Tunberg and Milena Minkova ran the classics program at the University of Kentucky, the only university program in America that conducted classes in Latin. They also hosted a summer, weeklong Latin immersion program. Nancy Llewellyn, the founder of SALVI, was also there. All three gave lectures in Latin, very little of which I could understand.

  There was also a lecture in English, by Anna Andresian, a diminutive whirlwind of energy who had taught both at SALVI and the University of Kentucky program. She had developed a sign language to help students understand the declensions. “I’m going to stand on this table so you all can see me,” she said, and then began to demonstrate her semaphores, which were brilliant, and included not only the declensions but also all the verb moods and tenses, including subjunctive and deponent. She explained some of the logic behind the semaphores: The nominative was the left hand held up, fingers spayed to introduce the sentence. The genitive was the right hand tapping the wrist, to connote ownership. My favorite was the dative, where the right hand opened and closed toward the left “shooting sparks of influence,” as she explained. This expressed the dative not only as an indirect object meaning “to” or “for” but also as something that was indirectly influenced by the verb in other ways, such as the dative of possession, the dative of reference, and her favorite, the dative of reference with genetic force. She gave the example of the latter, in sign language, of canis manum mihi mordet (the dog bites my hand). The dative mihi rather than the possessive adjective meam is used here to emphasize the impact of the bite, rather than the ownership of the hand.

  Each day we also had four classroom sessions. My first, much to my delight, was with Curtis. He started by asking each of the ten of us to introduce ourselves: Nomen mihi Anna est, habito Rhinebeck. We discussed humor and came up with adjectives to describe it, most of which had been in the Catullan lexicon: urbanitas, venustus, salsus, facetus, iocus, dicacitas. Curtis was very good at acting out words we didn’t know, reminding me how much I missed him, his passion and excitement for Latin, his sense of play, and his adorable nerdiness.

  Though I could understand much of what was being said in Latin, when it came my turn to speak, my mind went blank or reverted to French. When I mentioned this problem to Nancy Llewellyn, she assured me that I was encountering what she called linguistic interference, and that the brain would adjust to a new language after three days of solid exposure.

  By the end of the weekend, I’d memorized the most common words the various teachers used in conversation: Fortasse (perhaps) and igitur (therefore) function much as we have come to use “like,” as a connective pause. Ita was used for yes and minime for no—whether those were what the Romans used, no one could say for certain, but this group had adopted them as such.

  Terence Tunberg knew dozens of surprising words in Latin. “The Romans had more words for everyday stuff than you will ever learn if you only read poetry,” he told us.
Among them were propoma (cocktail) and cervisia (beer). He himself had coined a word for high heels, calceaenta fulta. The next morning I could tell that those three things had been much in evidence at the dinner I didn’t attend the night before. I overheard Mountain Man Hottie saying to someone, “I didn’t get in till three!” There might even have been sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll!

  Mountain Man Hottie, in the seminar I had with him, was incandescently brilliant and witty, even in Latin. I spoke with him afterward, because in the introductions that began each session, I learned that he lived in the Catskills and had been making maple syrup. “My fellow is a maple syrup maker,” I told him. “We live in Rhinebeck, where are you?” I was hoping to strike up a friendship with this adorable man, thinking that, as with Siddhi, if you’re too old to try to seduce them, why not adopt them? John Byron Kuhner (Byron!) lived about fifty miles west of us in the middle of the Catskills, but that’s all I learned before a beautiful blonde interrupted and he was lost to me.

  Near the end of the last day, Stephen Haff arrived with four of the Still Waters kids: my beloved Kimberly, along with three others, Leo, Stella, and Olivia. We spent twenty minutes in the hall outside the classroom, speed-translating the first of the Nugae Iocosae (Funny Trifles) that would be our text for the hour. It was a riddle:

  Ego sum principium mundi

  Et finis saeculorum.

  Per me omnia continentur,

  Sine me nihil est.

  Sum trinus et unus

  At tamen non sum deus.

  I am the principle of the world

  And the end of the ages.

  Everything is contained through me,

  Without me nothing exists,

  I am three and one

  But, nevertheless, I am not a god.

  None of us could come up with the answer before class began. Curtis, by happy chance, was the leader of the seminar and warmly welcomed our “young students from Still Waters.” He began by asking if one of them wanted to read the riddle in Latin. I nudged Kimberly; she read the Latin flawlessly.

  She was rewarded with applause, turned to me and whispered, “That’s the first time I’ve ever read out loud without being shy.”

  The class quickly came up with the answer to the riddle: time. While all of this took place in Latin, Stephen quietly translated to the two kids on either side of him, and I to those on either side of me. Then Stephen raised his hand. “Olivia has come up with a different answer,” he said. “Is it okay if she says it in English?”

  Olivia smiled and said. “Life.”

  Clearly Latin was not dead here. And indeed not even in the riddle. Because the original answer, I later learned, is the letter m, which comes at the beginning of mundi (world) and the end of saeculorum (ages), and its shape is three in one.

  The weekend turned out to be propitious in many ways. Stephen and Jason had a long meeting after the conference and within a few weeks had set up a formal partnership that institutionalized Latin study at Still Waters. They named the program Aequora, which means “an even surface” or “the sea in its calm, smooth state.” From then on, Stephen and I would be joined by some of the Living Latin attendees, as well as students from a high school associated with Paideia, to tutor the kids in Latin. I had found a new community, as interesting and varied as my lost publishing community. The only problem was, it, too, was in New York City. Would the city never let me go?

  Back at Vassar on Tuesday morning, tromping through the snow, I ran into Bert Lott.

  “I went to the Living Latin weekend in New York last weekend,” I told him. “It was amazing, and Curtis was there, too.”

  “Ah,” he said with a wry smile, “the Civil War reenactors of classical studies.”

  Within the small community of philologists and Latinists, there are two camps: those who favor Living Latin, approaching and teaching the language as one would a modern language; and the traditionalists, who want to retain the language as a purely written, dead language, which there is no reason to speak. Even traditionalists allow that reading aloud is essential when learning poetry, because the meter enhances meaning. They draw the line, however, at trying to fit Latin into modern speech.

  “There’s no use learning how to order coffee in Latin,” they argue, “as there’s nowhere to do such a thing except at some event made up simply to facilitate such useless endeavors.”

  Others believe that speaking makes learning the language more fun and engaging, not to mention that adding verbal, aural, and kinesthetic exercises to language acquisition complements the purely visual learning of the traditional method and liberates Latin from a purely heady domain by introducing a social sphere. Some, and I suspected that Bert is one of them, make fun of the Living Latinists.

  I, however, was all for them. Jason asked me to be on the advisory board of Paideia, which I happily agreed to do. I was so thrilled with the idea of having a new community that I assured him I was available for anything he wanted me to do. “Would you be willing to read a friend’s manuscript?” he asked me. “He was at the weekend, and you may have had a class with him: John Byron Kuhner, he has a Web site you can look at.” Byron! Mountain Man Hottie! Of course I’d be delighted to read his manuscript!

  I looked at John Byron Kuhner’s Web site: a blizzard of entries on a vast range of topics. As well as a Latinist, he was a latter-day Thoreau who, for the past six years, had been living in a one-room cabin without running water and only sporadic electricity. He wrote about this, that, and everything, from the erudite to the trivial, on his Web site. He was a scholar and philosopher by nature as well as a naturalist and involved with many Catskill organizations.

  I showed George his Web site. He took one look and said, “That’s the guy I told you about, remember, the Latinist?” I remembered he had mentioned a Latinist, a fellow follower of Michael Kudish, although I had paid little notice. I now did. What were the chances of George and me independently meeting someone who embodied both our eccentric interests? I called that a cosmic connection and the sort of coincidence that made me feel I was doing what I was supposed to be doing in life.

  I read John Byron Kuhner’s manuscript, which was more a philosophical exploration of Christianity, Islam, and atheism than a novel, then invited him to dinner. He was fascinating. His father had been a Catholic priest, who left the priesthood when his mother was eight months pregnant. The two never married, though they had two more children. John Byron had taught Latin in New Jersey schools for years, until his father’s death and the dissolution of his marriage, after which he followed Thoreau’s example and “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

  What a treat it was to get to know such a character. He was one of the deepest, most sophisticated thinkers I’d ever met. He seemed somehow to have combined Lucretian and Buddhist ideas with Christianity to find something very similar to the principles on which Stephen Haff founded Still Waters in a Storm, a radical and reliable form of acceptance and love.

  CHAPTER 14

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  —T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

  Harbingers of spring, in the form of bluebirds and robins, arrived just as the second half of Rob Brown’s class began. We would be reading and translating Book VI of The Aeneid, Aeneas’ trip to the underworld. As it was now officially spring, Persephone would be making her way up from the underworld into the sunny realms of her mother, Demeter. Perhaps we would pass her on our way down below.

  Rob introduced Virgil by telling us that it was because of Virgil that he had decided to become a Latinist. He’d started taking Latin at age eleven, but it was when he was sixteen
, and read Virgil’s first Eclogue, that he found his future path. “I was from a rural area of England, and those first lines sent a ringing bell of recognition in me.”

  That night I looked up the lines:

  Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi

  silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena;

  nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva.

  Nos patriam fugimus.

  You, Tityrus, lying under the canopy of a spreading beech

  considering the woodland Muse on slender reed;

  we are leaving our country’s boundaries and sweet fields.

  We have fled our country.

  Rob couldn’t have known, at the tender age of sixteen when he first read those lines, that he, too, would flee his patria and become an exile. But perhaps, as Virgil would so eloquently demonstrate, the future is always present in the past.

  I was happy to finally be reading Virgil, the undisputed grand master of Latin poetry. I had prepared for class by reading a new translation of The Aeneid by Robert Fagles during our two-week break, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was a true page-turner. I hadn’t read the epic poem since college. In the one classics class I took while at Berkeley, we had, in three short months, plowed through The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Persian Wars, The Peloponnesian Wars, and Sophocles’ Theban Plays (in English, of course). Only at the end of the quarter did we turn to the Romans, reading a bit of Ovid, Propertius, and finishing up with The Aeneid.

  I hadn’t loved The Aeneid anywhere near as much as I loved The Odyssey, which became my metaphor for my own progress in the publishing world.

  What a difference age makes in the way we read! As a youth I had found Aeneas a neurotic hero compared to Achilles and Odysseus. Now I identified with all the complexities he had to endure, the troubles that fate forced on him, the tensions between love and duty, past and future, his displacement and long voyage in search of a new homeland. There is a kind of sadness to Aeneas, even in the midst of triumph. Though lacking a heroic destiny, my journey over the past few years had not been unlike that of Aeneas: perpetually poised between past and future, mourning and hope. And I was learning, as he did, that acceptance, perhaps even serenity, might be found not by forgetting the past but by remembering and honoring it. This, I realized, was one of the many things my Latin studies were doing for me. They were reconciling me with my long-dead mother. When I embarked on this Latin journey, I was running away from her legacy; but instead, I had run right into her. I was doing something she would have wished me to do, something she herself had loved.