Living with a Dead Language Read online

  My publishing career ended thirty-four years later, at the dawn of the recession of 2008. For the previous seven years, I’d had the perfect situation: I worked part-time, edited only five or six titles a year. I was more successful than ever, acquiring and editing Life of Pi, A Three Dog Life, The Crimson Petal and the White, among other critically acclaimed best sellers. No matter. The recession was disastrous for the already highly leveraged company. I was among forty to be laid off in a single day.

  Luckily, I’d unconsciously set myself up for an early retirement. In 2006, the year my daughter left for college, I had sold my apartment in New York and used the spoils to rebuild my weekend house in rural Rhinebeck in upstate New York. Like every book editor, I had spent many hours reading and editing at home, but now I spent more of those hours in the country. I could put on my telephone earpiece and have editorial discussions while pulling weeds in my garden. I stayed in the city two or three nights a week, where I could still enjoy the conversations, lunches, dinners, and parties that were the social side benefit of my professional life, but I had the peace and quiet of the country to come home to.

  During the first winter, however, living in the country began to seem like a foolhardy, even disastrous, decision. Was it possible to find happiness in the middle of eleven rural acres with only my dog, Augie, a twelve-pound poodle, for company? There were no other houses or people visible from my property, only a few winter birds, and the surrounding silence of the brown and grey woods.

  That spring, I hazarded Match.com, mostly to prove to myself that I would never meet an appropriate man in the country, that I should give up and sell my newly rebuilt house, admit a (quite costly) mistake, and move back to Manhattan. My property was too much, too isolated for a woman alone. And really, I was a city girl.

  I typed in my zip code and the first man to pop up was George, the cute fellow I had noticed in the one Iyengar yoga class offered in my town. I’d wanted to get next to him for quite a while, but I always arrived early, he late (a duet at which we became adept). His nom de Match was Aquila, Latin for Eagle. I liked the Latin and I liked his profile. My nom de Match was Jakuan. A Zen student himself, George recognized Jakuan as a dharma name and looked up the meaning: Serenity.

  Like all Match.com ads, ours were both guilty of false advertising, if only by inference. George didn’t know Latin, he wasn’t well read, and he had a tin ear for language. And I was anything but serene.

  Nevertheless, we fell in love. He stayed one night and never left.

  That was either great good fortune or a great irony of fate or both. Eight months later I was fired. Moving back to New York was out of the question, both financially and romantically. George was a quintessential country man.

  My rural domain had been a perfect counterpoint to the hurly-burly of New York City. But when I lost my job and the literary community that had sustained me for over thirty years, it felt like exile. The e-mails and phone calls that used to engage a few hours every day ceased to arrive. Now I spent my days reading, preparing meals, gardening, walking with my dog along quiet country lanes, organizing cabinets, making all those household perfections I’d never had time for, and that, frankly, I didn’t care much about. And then what?

  I never could have imagined, when I was an overly busy New York editor and exhausted single mother, that there could be too much time, that an abundance of free time could become a source of dread. The days meandered into one another, weekdays indistinguishable from weekends, mornings, afternoons, evenings, whole days of dawdling. I had lost my identity. I had lost my purpose, which had been driving me so hard for so long that I hadn’t realized its power. I’d even lost the purpose of earning a living. I wasn’t rich, but I had pensions and savings and I could bring in some extra income with freelance work. And living in the country was so much cheaper than in the city. I was fifty-eight years old and hoped for twenty or even thirty more years compos mentis. That was almost as many years as I’d been an editor in the large New York publishing world. How would I fill so many days, months, years? Who was I now, without the work that had been my passionate purpose and my goad for thirty-four years? The exterior compulsions were gone but I was still here. What was I going to do with my still driven, anxious self, ever closer to the void yawning before me?

  Maybe I should find some way to enact my desire to make the study of grammar and syntax popular and fun. Perhaps I should write a children’s book and build a proper sentence, adding one part of speech per page in some really clever way. I even came up with the first page:

  LOOK!

  A perfectly acceptable sentence, an imperative verb, but lonely, without even a named subject

  That was as far as I got. I was in the same situation as the sentence—lonely and in need of a subject.

  I always used to tell young people who didn’t know what to do with their lives, “Pick something you’re interested in, invest some time in it, and if it clicks, that something will inevitably lead you somewhere, a job, a hobby, a passion.” I pondered what I had enjoyed most, and the answer kept coming up: words, grammar, books, language. I had worked in that world my entire adult life. What had I missed?

  I had missed Latin. I had missed knowing the roots of my word home. How much better would I understand words, grammar, and syntax if I went back to the mother of Western tongues? I could, at long last, complete my education. I could, after all these years, learn what Latinate actually meant. I could, ex post facto, share a language with my mother. And a classroom would put me in the company of young people, give me a reason to get out of my pajamas, take a bath, and leave the house. I researched the colleges in my area and was dismayed to learn that none of the three community colleges or two nearby state colleges offered Latin. Not even the Catholic college offered it. How had this subject, once essential for any educated person, dropped so completely from the syllabus?

  Finally, to my great relief, I discovered that Bard College, a small, private liberal arts college near me, did offer Latin. I sent an e-mail plea to the professor who would be teaching the beginning course in September, asking him to let me audit. My Web site was below my signature; I had discovered well-known and important writers. It was clear I was a serious literary person. I assumed he’d welcome me. Wouldn’t I be a good influence on the youngsters in class—an old person taking Latin for no reason but love? He wrote back, “I’m sorry to say but I have a policy never to let anyone audit a first-year language course. I find it never works.” He went on to add that I was welcome to officially enroll in the course. I phoned the registrar: The fee would be $5,600 a semester.

  That set me back for a year, another year of wondering how I’d possibly survive another twenty (or, a scary thought, thirty) years without becoming a drunk, a bore, a depressive. I had watched my mother live that death-in-life trio for the last ten years of her life. If I followed her path, I’d be dead in eight years.

  So I took on more and more uninspiring freelance work and honed my gourmet cooking skills. With the companionship of too many glasses of wine, I could while away hours comparing recipes, shopping, and preparing meals, which delighted George. I gained ten pounds. Most of my hours were spent reading. I explored the wonders and limitations of the Kindle: I could sample the first chapter of a book before I bought it, thus saving myself buying well-reviewed but not-to-my-taste novels. I had spent so many years wading through manuscripts, searching for something engaging, so many years having so little “antidotal” reading time, that my reading tastes were now more stringent than ever. The five volumes of Trollope’s Palliser novels were great on the Kindle and kept me occupied for a few weeks. (From him I learned the delightful word “quidnunc,” meaning a nosy person, from the Latin meaning, literally, what now?) The essays of David Foster Wallace, with so many footnotes, so many Latin words, and so many abbreviations that I was familiar with but didn’t truly know the meaning of, required a printed book. What is the differen
ce between cf. and viz. and q.v.? And what exactly did QED mean? I didn’t know. I looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary. “QED: abbr. Latin quod erat demonstrandum (which was to be demonstrated).” I would later learn that the construction is called a passive periphrastic by Latinists, and is more perfectly translated expressing necessity: “which was needing to be demonstrated.” There it was. My need had been demonstrated.

  The following summer I researched Latin classes at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. A year ago it had seemed too distant, a forty-five-minute drive away. I hated the endless driving country living required. All those years in New York City had accustomed me to walking and public transportation. Lone car driving seemed irresponsible: all that fuel for only one person. Nevertheless, the destination would be worthy. The yearlong course met four days a week at 9:00 A.M. That would certainly fill up a few hours of my empty life.

  I googled Curtis Dozier, the professor who would be teaching beginning Latin. On the Rate Your Professor Web site I found these comments:

  He’s quirky and nerdy, but in the best possible way and you can really tell that he’s passionate about Latin. Plus he’s cute.

  He geeks out all the time. He’s very invested in teaching—he cried the last day of class—most adorable thing EVER.

  I e-mailed Curtis Dozier and arranged to meet him at his office a month before class was to begin. He was a skinny, strawberry blond, Herman’s Hermits–type man (my major seventh-grade crush), only three years older than my daughter, shy, serious, and definitely adorable. He had gotten his PhD from UC Berkeley, my alma mater, only two years before, and he was used to having auditors in his classes. He was a great fan of Life of Pi, so was happy to have me in his class. I was worried that I would have trouble with all the memorization, but he thought my background in French would help me considerably.

  “Why do you want to do this?” he asked. “It’s a lot of work.”

  “I love words,” I told him. “And now I don’t work anymore, and I’m sort of going crazy and I really need to keep my brain, and thus myself, alive, and I really need some outside structure and . . .” He stopped my rush of words with an upraised hand and a smile. “I understand completely,” he said. As I was leaving, thanking him, calling him Professor Dozier, he said, “And you can call me Curtis.”

  I was in! I would be a Vassar girl. In high school, when I’d read The Group, Mary McCarthy’s privileged, sophisticated Vassar girls seemed to inhabit a world light-years from mine. I’d known a number of women and men—the college had gone coed in 1974—who had attended Vassar, but I’d never visited the campus. And what a beautiful campus it is: traditionally Ivy League (or Seven Sisters in this case) with imposing ivy-covered Collegiate Gothic buildings, as well as some modern additions, which give it both a contemporary and classical feel. Not much was going on that summer day, but it was a lovely place to walk: winding pathways snaking among architecturally pleasing buildings, with well-maintained landscaping and sprawling specimen trees gracing the many lawns.

  I arrived at 8:00 A.M. for the first day of class, a hot, sunny, late August day. Class didn’t start for an hour, but I needed to buy the textbook and I wanted to appear serious and prepared. The bookstore shelves, alphabetically keyed to classes, went from Chinese to Computer Science: no Classics section. When I asked at the desk, I was told Classics had been renamed “Greek and Roman Studies,” GRST for short. Its four shelves of offerings were between the larger domains of German Studies and Hispanic Studies. I later learned that Classics had been changed to GRST only the year before; a young woman was the department chair, and she had convinced her colleagues that the term “classics” was outmoded and implied a value judgment. Who were they to appropriate the term “classic” only to their field of study? Political correctness was alive and well at Vassar. Besides, she thought Greek and Roman Studies sounded more appealing, likely to attract more students. The text and accompanying workbook, Learn to Read Latin, were expensive, ninety dollars, and must have weighed eight pounds.

  Our class was held in the Sanders Classroom, a three-story, redbrick, copper-roofed building in the Georgian style. It was decidedly less elegant inside than out. Latin met on the first floor, half below grade, in a large corner room. I was the first to arrive. Thirty student desks of varying style and vintage, some wood, most plastic, were haphazardly scattered around the room, and a metal teacher’s desk angled before the freshly washed blackboard that spanned the wall at the front of the room. I hadn’t been in such a room for close to forty years, but I recognized the smell immediately: chalk dust and books and anticipation, the smells of learning. I figured that as an auditor I should sit at the back, so I positioned myself in the last row on the eastern side of the room. Along with my new books, I had bought a spiral notebook, puce, with pockets inside for loose papers.

  Around 8:45 the students began dribbling in. Most of them looked like freshmen, but a few weren’t. I could tell by the way they walked, whether they recognized another classmate, how they chose their desk. Three cute gay boys, jolly and talkative, sat together along the east wall next to the door. A tall, lumpy fellow galumphed in, then others, mostly singly, one boy-girl pair. No new arrival chose to sit closer than two desks away from me, a lone grey head in a sea of fresh-faced youth. Finally, an eccentrically dressed brunette sat next to me. I was so relieved! The young woman’s name was Camilla. She was a freshman from Idaho. An art major, she loved literature and so had decided to learn Latin. Her mother was a single, hardworking nurse, and Camilla had a campus job. She was also on the golf team. Of course I learned all this later, after she’d become my best friend in class. Another girl, overweight, truculent Stella, sat next to Camilla.

  There was not a piercing or tattoo to be seen among the students. Only one thin young man, who suffered some sort of ambulatory awkwardness, had a magenta stripe running from forehead to nape through his hair; another, with the looks and carriage of a heartbreaker, sported a soul patch. Out of twenty-one there was one Hispanic student, one black, fourteen males, and seven females. That was a surprise, since Vassar had far more women than men, and literary fields usually attracted many more females than males. I would learn, as the year progressed, how much Rome, with its emphasis on power, war, and building, was a male domain, and thus attracted its own.

  On that first day, as on every day thereafter, Curtis Dozier arrived at exactly 9:00. “Salvete discipuli!” He pronounced it as he wrote it on the board; he then declaimed and wrote our response: “Salve Magister!” We repeated in unison. At first strike, it was a perfect distillation of the preeminence of hierarchy in ancient Rome, passed down now in English: master and disciple.

  Curtis passed out index cards, on which we were to write how much Latin we’d studied previously and why we were taking the class. When I later interviewed several of the students, I discovered that most of them had already had a few years of Latin in high school. An alarming number of them, including some of the best Latinists, were taking the class because it was the only language class that didn’t meet on Fridays. All the other foreign language classes met five days a week, at 9:00 A.M., and a full year’s language study was a graduation requirement at Vassar. So much for seriousness! A day a week’s extra sleep was worth the drudgey eccentricity of Latin.

  One young man who, it became obvious as the year progressed, was the worst in the class, was being forced to take Latin by his father. Roger was an economics student and had no interest in language. But his father prided himself on his proficiency in Latin, and made Roger’s Latin studies a financial requirement. My father had done the same thing to me, only from the opposite discipline, when he had forced me to take an economics class at Berkeley so I would “learn something useful” for his investment. I had been infuriated by his wasting my time with that class, though as the years passed I became more and more grateful: It had helped me understand the flow of money in the world. When I had first wrangled my own i
mprint at Simon and Schuster, the CFO said to a colleague, “It’s nice Ann got an imprint; she’s the only editor who ever comes to me to discuss the finances of books. And she’s made a lot of money for the company. The only thing that worries me is that she has a literary bent.” (Pax, Pater.)

  Economics and literature might intersect in business and academia, but clearly the intent of each inhabits a world foreign to the other.

  Curtis spent the rest of the forty-five-minute class period covering administrative details: He reminded everyone that it was a full-year class, and no credit would be given if you dropped out between semesters. There would be a quiz every Thursday, as well as a midterm and a final, and homework every night. He then introduced Ella, the senior student assistant, who would hold review sessions and be available for one-on-one tutoring: He encouraged us to use her; she had been awarded the hours, and she needed to earn them. She was the opposite of what I might have expected, a sultry, exotic beauty, sexily dressed, and with a rippling mane of black hair. With that, Curtis bade us Salvete.

  CHAPTER 2

  The principles and rules of grammar are the means by which the forms of language are made to correspond with the universal forms of thought. The distinctions between the various parts of speech, between the cases of nouns, the moods and tenses of verbs, the functions of participles, are distinctions in thought, not merely in words.

  —John Stuart Mill

  The next morning, I awoke with the sun, and rather than lolling abed, as was my habit, I thought I’d be a good classical scholar and live by that celestial body, as the Romans did. I was so excited I didn’t even bathe, but dressed and got in my car, tea in hand, and drove to campus, even though I knew I’d be almost two hours early for class. I was used to arriving early for things. I even had to wait thirty minutes to check out the breakfast offerings at “The Retreat,” which didn’t open until 7:30. It wasn’t the official cafeteria, but more of a large snack bar in the main building. I was early even there—only the slim, slope-backed janitor, with whom I would develop a friendly acquaintance over the next four years, was there finishing up his mopping. Since I was starting a new era, one fixed by morning discipline and study, I avoided the delicious-looking blueberry muffins and cranberry-walnut scones and dished myself up a small bowl of oatmeal. Condiments of raisins, blueberries, granola, and brown sugar were offered. I eschewed only the brown sugar.