Breakfast with Pandora

The utility of studying Latin and Greek

Over here a mini-controversy on the utility of studying Greek and Latin, sometimes called Classical Studies, or (as I prefer) Classics.

(Image: Cicero orating against Catiline)

My position on that is summed up in the following: 

My ideal primary school would have the following four core subjects: Art, Music, Physical Education, Latin and Greek.

Yes, students would take Latin and Greek in kindergarten and they would learn to read English like demons. In fact, they would devour books. Guaranteed.

Middle school would retain the four core subjects. English and history would be combined into one cross-disciplinary class, and math and science would be combined into another single class, and they would be electives.

In the upper school, students could opt for a more conventional subject smorgasbord, including modern foreign language with immersion in target language nations for up to a year.

Post-secondary education would focus on training students in specific skills, except for the next generation of teachers, who would be further educated in a liberal arts and sciences track.

My sense is that education means equipping the brain to think broadly, liberally, humanely, critically, and deeply. Training, by contrast, is equipping a human being to do a specific needed skill.

Therefore, we should have students study at a young age those subjects that form the brain in the most comprehensive way possible. And it has been shown scientifically that the four core subjects of my ideal school are those that do that. Music is probably best in this area, but I think Latin and Greek are a close second.

Once students get older and have an established foundation for critical thinking, they can easily acquire all the skills they need, or study further the subjects that interest them.

So I think Classics is very important to education.

But I am not so thrilled with Classics as a university research subject. Classics is a very old subject and has been studied thoroughly. In the mid- to late-twentieth century there was a flowering of interpretive studies that were the happy result of hundreds of years of painstaking philology-- that is, scholars making sure the surviving manuscripts of ancient texts were as readable as possible.

Nowadays we do not need another book about the Iliad, and we most certainly do not need more books on the less important authors such as Silius Italicus. My sense is that we could do without any more research on Classics for the next 50 years and we would not be the poorer for it.

I would encourage the next generation of Classics Ph.D.'s (of which, I am told, there are too many) not to pursue a tenure-track job (of which, I am told, there are too few) at a college of university. Teach high school, middle school, elementary school Latin and Greek. You will be happy, your students will be happy, and the nation will thank you.

The oath and ancient religion

The flap over the swearing-in ceremony during inauguration left me unsurprised in a way, astonished in another.

Chief Justice Roberts, in a now much-discussed moment, flubbed a line in the ceremony, and President Obama did so as well.

Photo: a reader wants me to put more pictures into my blog. Here's one.

I was mildly put off by the stumble, but thought nothing else over it than, "Somebody's going to want a do-over."

The oath is an extremely ancient human phenomenon, begun in a time when writing a contract was an exception rather than a rule. An oath is a promise, and traditionally the swearer's promise is backed by his or her willingness to be punished by a god if he or she goes back on it.

This type of oath was commonplace in ancient Greece. The Olympian gods commonly swore on the River Styx, which, being the River of Death, was anathema to them. Mortals swore by Zeus, the god of public civilized life, asking to be struck by lightning if they broke their promise.

The child's phrase "Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye" is a direct transposition of ancient oath formulas.

The oath thus takes on a religious, magical significance for some people, even Christians, despite Jesus' command not to swear at all (Matthew 5:34), letting "Your yes be yes and your no be no." Anything more, he says, is "of evil."

For some strange reason, we still believe that swearing on a Bible has some kind of power, despite the founder of Christianity's direct prohibition of the practice of oaths.

One other factor in the flub also relates to traditional religion: the anxiety of liminality and the desire for transitions to be smooth and under control.

I have written before (and before that) about how humans get anxious when things change-- at times such as New Year's, we can get downright panicky. Our built-in defense mechanism is to create processes that we can control (unlike the transition itself), and thereby console ourselves that everything's going to be okay (deep breath!).

The swearing-in thus has become the focal point of the inauguration, because it is the observed moment of transition between president-elect and president. We want it to go well, because if it doesn't, then maybe the transition didn't go well, and that chaos will bleed into regular time.

In fact, the word inauguration refers to a priestly office in Roman religion: an augur would survey the supernatural realm for omens of the future, often by inspecting the organs of a newly-sacrificed animal, or by scanning the skies for flights of birds.

A favorable reading meant that the future "augured" well.

So no, it didn't surprise me that someone thought that Obama's presidency didn't "take" when he didn't say the words exactly, despite his clear intention to do exactly what the oath says.

But it does astonish me that in this day and age, when so many people put so much store by the rational, the logical, the visible, and the scientifically reproducible, that anyone would care that one word in a set of words was said out of order.

Human beings are religious creatures. We believe in magic, miracles, and the world beyond, even if we don't acknowledge it. I don't think belief is a bad thing. After all, who would be so arrogant as to pretend that or he or she knows so much about the universe as to be able to say, "This is how far the universe goes and no farther?"

If we're going to have oaths, we might as well acknowledge we're not so scientific after all.

The reason we are alive

It has been a long, slogging, swamp-gas sniffing school year, and now that it is finally in its last hideous stages, I have come to wisdom and finally realized the reason we are alive:

Strawberries.

I have been making do on store-bought strawberries ever since the season came in, because I had not the time or the energy to get to the Farmers' Market or to a pick-your-own patch.

Store-bought strawberries, from California, Florida, or God knows where, taste like a cutting board that has been lightly rinsed after playing host to the nubbly skins of real, local, sweet strawberries. There is that whiff of some ambrosial memory, but mostly what you taste is wood and water.

Store-bought are so inferior to the real thing that it is an act of neurotic self-punishment to eat them after you have experienced the real.

So finally, at the end of this overlong school year, this weekend, Memorial Day weekend, I had a day off, a proper night's sleep, and an opportunity to shop.

Our Farmers' Market is a kind of theme park (a description I first read in Victor Davis Hanson's Fields Without Dreams). The vendors pretty much all sell the same thing, at the same cost, with the same high quality. The fun for the customer is to choose a vendor who's friendly, colorful, authentic-looking and -sounding, and whose product just seems a cut above everyone else's.

I came expressly for strawberries and found upwards of two dozen sellers. Impossible to choose one. I took my stroll all the way down to the end of the open-sided building, where in summer the sparrows swoop about the eaves, chattering and browsing, splay-legged, on whatever drops to the floor.

It was crowded-- just the way I like it. You can scope out everything in perfect anonymity.

Almost.

As I made my way to the end with the plants and the flowers, I approached a big man in a red baseball cap, sitting in front of a table loaded with nothing but strawberries.

"Try one," he said, with the best authoritative and irresistible hospitality of a Southern yeoman.

The sampling process is a little like communion, a little like the marriage of Persephone and Hades. Once you've eaten from a farmer's produce, a bond is forged. It takes a brave customer to walk away from a table after he's made eye-contact and bit into a man's life work.

Fortunately, I didn't have to walk away.

The strawberry was a good in itself-- a creamy red spicy winey magic spell conjuring nostalgia and future possibility in the same time-nullifying moment it took for my taste buds to transfer the sensation to my brain.

"This one's a winner," I said, and the man seemed to grow larger in his chair, to plump up like his strawberries.

"I thought so," he crowed. "I knew it before you even tasted it." He turned to the other folk milling and passing behind me. "Come on, everyone try one!"

I bought 4 quarts and got drunk on them sampling all the way home.

One Sunday long ago, in my evangelical youth, an ordained person of some Protestant persuasion summed up the meaning of life succinctly: "To love God, and to enjoy Him forever."

Sometimes it's difficult to love and enjoy a Person who's rumored to be living way up in the sky somewhere, looking down from a throne, stroking a white beard and considering when the end of time is to come.

But enjoying a real strawberry that's been grown, offered, sold, and eaten in love is about the most accessible thing you can do. All you have to do is love yourself enough to devote the time and effort it takes simply to move your rear end to a place where you can do the enjoying.

Whenever anyone asks what food people think will be in heaven, someone always comes out with "strawberries and cream." Maybe. But I'm inclined to think that whenever I bite into a good,  honest strawberry, that other untouchable world has overlapped this one-- showing that, in a way, we already are in heaven.