Living with a Dead Language Read online

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t, I followed the rules.”

  That was alarming. “Did you ever self-flagellate?” I asked hopefully.

  “I don’t know, Ann, you may be too wild for me,” was his only response.

  Certainly I was. But I’d thought that maybe it was time for me to stop being wild. Maybe I could use my excess wild to revitalize him. I had enough libido for both of us and trusted its powers. Besides, my nine-year-old daughter, Sophie, adored his eight-year-old son, and after a five-year parade of boyfriends, Sophie and I were both ready to settle down and try to have a normal family. Two months into our relationship, I was besieged. I very painfully and publicly lost my imprint and was dragged through the national press with my skin off. The capper was a front-page article in the New York Observer with the headline “Amid ‘Pattygate’ and Power Plays Simon & Schuster Dethrones Poseidon.” The same day it appeared, my apartment was robbed of radio, stereo, and jewelry, including my mother’s diamond earrings, one of the few pieces of her jewelry I’d saved. Amazingly, the thief dropped one of the earrings on the floor as he made his way out the window and onto the fire escape. The police told me the burglary was an inside job; so was my professional scandal. I had been set up, but I couldn’t talk to the press; I was the sole support of a nine-year-old, and I knew getting into an argument with my boss in the media might get me blackballed. I was alone and scared. I was reeling. The Ablative Absolute pressed his matrimonial suit. I needed something solid to hold on to. I married him.

  Although he’d left the priesthood before being ordained, he was a certified exorcist: “I can say abracadabra over you and wipe out your devils,” he once joked. But it wasn’t true: He could not take the devils out of me. I was soon miserable, he was soon angry, and, after one year, I began strategizing exit routes. I was stopped by serial catastrophes—an aetas horribilis rather than a mere annus horribilis.

  I had taken a new, demanding position as editorial director at a different publishing house, which I soon hated. It turned out to be the wrong company for me, and I didn’t like being a manager. I just wanted to be left alone with my books, not deal with the problems of eight other editors.

  Simultaneously, my father, who had moved to Florida three years after my mother’s death, went in for kidney surgery and came out hooked up to a breathing machine, tied to a bed, stuck in some netherworld of unconsciousness, unable to speak for six months. I commuted to Florida every other weekend. He, the “miracle man,” got off the machine only to resume his cigarette habit. He died seven months later.

  A year after his death, almost to the day, I was diagnosed with a very scary, invasive cancer and lived on planet chemo for a year. When I emerged from my chemical haze, my daughter entered adolescence like a rocket ship exploding on takeoff and had to be sent away to boarding school.

  I needed the ablative absolute to enclose those terrible ten years, which I was relieved to think of as an aberration in the complex sentence that was my life. This new grammatical fix allowed me to box them up in an elegant phrase: Decem annis peractis, iterum coepi vivere (With those ten years finished, I began to live again). I left my husband, Sophie went off to college, and I moved to a new, part-time job where I had to be in the office only two days a week. So I reversed my lifestyle: I spent four or five days in the country and only two or three in the city. I became a serious Zen student and meditated almost every day. I was practicing slowing down. It was difficult.

  Because it’s Latin, which always throws a wrench into translation, there are also ablative absolutes without a participle: a noun and adjective, or two nouns in the ablative will suffice—as in ceteris paribus (with all things being equal). The perennially popular mutatis mutandis (changing only those things that need to be changed) is also an ablative absolute. It applies to law, but also, pointedly, to editing: Once, I found an editor who worked at my imprint changing sentences that were perfectly good, trying to make the novel hers rather than the author’s. This, to me, was trespassing. If only she’d studied Latin, perhaps she would have kept her true role more in mind.

  Though grammatically complex, the phrase shows both the compact genius of the language, as well as the challenges posed to a beginning Latinist. Both mutatis and mutandis come from the Latin verb muto, mutare, meaning “to change.”

  Mutatis is the perfect passive participle (ablative plural neuter), literally meaning “having been changed.”

  Mutandis is the gerundive (ablative plural neuter), which conveys the idea of necessity, hence: “things needing to be changed.”

  In mutatis mutandis the participle has been turned into a noun and the gerundive its adjective. It’s taken me only half an hour to figure this out.

  Finally April arrived, but rather than the beginning of spring, it marked the endless ending of winter. It was a time when I especially missed the city, where spring usually arrived two weeks earlier and was not encrusted with filthy, never-melting snow. And the streets were busy.

  I began going to the city every Thursday after class for a day or two. George didn’t mind—he loved to climb the winter Catskills, or ski, or snowshoe. For him, winter was rest time, outdoor time. I found country winter intolerable, although life in the city seemed to be continuing on quite well without me. And the room I rented from a friend for those few days felt nothing like home; the mattress on the pullout bed wreaked havoc on my back, and the cable TV hookup was so byzantine that I soon ceased even trying to turn it on. Had I, in cashing out of the teeming city and moving to the quiet country, made the same sort of mistake I’d made marrying the Ablative Absolute? I had always known that once one “sells out” of New York City, one could almost never afford to buy back in. Was my real life, still in the city, now contained in an ablative absolute relicta urbe (after the city was abandoned)? The question haunted me.

  Latin had a specific word for winter (hiems, hiemis) and autumn (autumnus, autumni); spring was ver, veris (the same root as viridis, green); and summer was aestas, aestatis, which is a variation of aestus, aestus, meaning heat. Perhaps, no matter what language, we know spring only when green shoots begin springing from the ground and red and yellow buds begin to swell on trees and shrubs. However, none of the above was happening in my garden.

  To make matters worse, in class, right after the ablative absolute we were introduced to the active and passive periphrastics, which made the ablative absolute look like a piece of cake. My Ablative Absolute’s oft-repeated phrase, de gustibus non disputandum est (you can’t argue about taste), I now learned is actually a passive periphrastic.

  Periphrastic is Greek for “speak around.” The active periphrastic is simply the future active participle, which carries an intended action: Ver saliturus (spring is about to spring forth).

  But the passive periphrastic, which is the future passive participle with the verb sum, brings with it necessity: Nix sole calido liquanda est (the snow must be melted by the warm sun).

  I didn’t understand how these constructions got their names: What did they speak around? Even my trusty American Heritage Dictionary offered little help, defining periphrastic as “Grammar constructed by using an auxiliary word rather than an inflected form; for example, of father is the periphrastic possessive case of father but father’s is the inflected possessive case [the genitive inflection, still retained in English], and did say is the periphrastic past tense of say but said is the inflected past tense.”

  Hah! Who knew English grammar could surpass Latin grammar in complicated forms! Even after banging my head against this conundrum, and fruitlessly searching the Internet, I still don’t understand what the English and Latin concepts have in common, or why the Latin concept means what it does. Perhaps the Romans, so attuned to power, simply decided both intent (future periphrastic) and compulsion (passive periphrastic) deserved their very own syntax. Perhaps they thought this mode of expression made their power more polite.

 
On the morning of April 21, the birthday of Rome, Curtis staged a spring celebration, even though there was nothing springlike about the grey, sleet-spitting day. I think he was rewarding us for having gotten through the participles, gerunds and gerundives, and periphrastics.

  He brought in two large boxes of doughnuts, which were passed around the class. We all took one (I chose the toasted coconut, always my favorite). I was surprised that no one took seconds. There were quite a few left in the box. I found that more surprising than the fact that Rome even had a birthday that was still known after all these years. I later learned that April 21 was chosen because it was the day of the festival sacred to Pales, goddess of shepherds. During the late Republic the scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, after much antiquarian research, decided that the official birth year of Rome would be 753 B.C. No one knows exactly why.

  The following week a patch of snowdrops and the short, slender reeds of daffodils began poking above the melting snow. Augie began spending more and more time outside: In these early spring days he favored the cement apron of the barn door, which got all-day sun and retained its warmth better than the lawn. The bluebird pair was setting up housekeeping in their blue birdhouse outside the kitchen window, as they did every year, but this year they had to fight off an invading swallow couple, who, in the end, forced them into the house on the outskirts of the garden.

  George now drank his morning coffee outside on the patio. It wasn’t warm, but he was like a tree, his sap rising and falling with the sun. He’d dress in layers: hat and fleece, long underwear and warm socks, and sit there for an hour or so, drinking coffee, contemplating whatever it was he contemplated. Unlike me, George liked silence in the morning. I usually greeted the day already in the middle of a conversation with myself about something or other with which I often tried to engage him.

  “Ann, I don’t want to be inside your busy mind right now,” he would say, as he retreated to the birdsong outside. It wasn’t warm enough for me to sit outside in the morning. So I would take up my conversation with words. There were always new words to memorize, familiar words to be nuanced, and ever more qu words to be revisited again and again. There was always a new grammatical concept to fill my vorax mind.

  In class, we zoomed through the remaining four chapters in a scant month. Finally, spring had sprung, leaping and bounding into bloom, and in the classroom, faces, voices, and vibe were all brighter. Students now chatted before class, comparing notes on senior papers or plans for junior years abroad. Gone was the alienated preclass silence of each student alone in his or her bubble with cell phone or uncompleted homework. The girls were showing off their legs; Dylan was slouching sexily in shorts and wifebeater tees; flip-flops abounded.

  On one of the first truly warm days, we had a fire drill. It was like a party, everyone smiling, students from other classes sitting with us on the benches and suddenly green lawns. We lingered even after the all-clear bell sounded, soaking up the long longed-for sun. Finally Curtis herded us in. For the first time, I felt younger than he. I would have stayed outside on that glorious spring day, lessons be damned.

  We sped through impersonal constructions, fear, prevention, and result clauses. We skipped many topics, and no one minded: Did we really need to learn the supine, the middle-voice verb, the little-used locative case, and the historical infinitive? The blossoms of the shadblow tree (so named because the tree blooms at the same time the shad run the Hudson) were blowing in the breezes and, on the parklike grounds of the Vassar campus, ancient specimen trees were in profuse bloom. Daffodils, tulips, and grape hyacinth lined the walkways. What for months had been grey clumps of sticks were now lively with bloom: yellow forsythia, persimmon-colored quince, and the charming pale earrings of artemisia.

  At home the passive periphrastic prevailed: There were gardens that must be cleaned and tended (hortulus colendus est!), spring clothes and linens to be unpacked and organized, walks to be taken, a life to be lived (vivendum est!). Suddenly country life was delightful. Every day another bright bulb bloomed. Life abounded all around me. Maybe I didn’t need so many people after all, maybe flowers could dispel loneliness.

  Like any student eager for a break from the daily slog of memorization and homework, I was ready for summer, or at least sort of ready. I would lose all my classmates: Camilla would be gone, as would Stella and Dylan, magenta-striped Tim and the Three Graces. Latin class was our only connection. Despite my repeated appeals, Camilla had no plans to continue with Latin; she was committed to being an artist, and between her work-study job, the golf team, sculpture, painting, and core requirements, she didn’t have the time for it. But I was determined to continue on taking Latin the following year, though I wouldn’t be studying with Curtis, who would once again be teaching beginning Latin as well as intermediate Greek and a freshman writing seminar.

  Curtis, delightfully, left us with the longest word in Latin: Circumnavigaveramusne? (Had we circumnavigated?) At twenty-one letters it comes in well behind the twenty-eight letters of the longest untechnical, uncoined English word, antidisestablishmentarianism. The Romans had no globe. Perhaps they preferred sailing all the way around their language, which voyage, after a full year’s study, I had barely begun.

  CHAPTER 5

  [Philip] Roth himself has predicted—with excessive gloom, I hope—that before long the reading of novels will occupy a niche not much more significant than the one currently occupied by the reading of poems in Latin.

  —Joseph O’Neill, The Atlantic, April 1, 2012

  The summer was long and I missed the daily occupation of class and schoolwork, so I was happy when September rolled around again. I was beginning my second year with intermediate Latin, a course devoted to Catullus. We were given a more elegant room on the second floor of Sanders Classroom, a long, high-ceilinged, sun-filled seminar room with oversized windows, a well-worn wooden table bearing many scratches but little graffiti, and an assortment of mismatched chairs. The fifty-minute class met at 10:00 A.M. three mornings a week, so I had time for a leisurely breakfast at the Retreat. There I spotted Alissa, a small, unprepossessing girl with long, tangly, mousey brown hair whom I remembered well from the year before.

  She starred in the only drama I had witnessed during last year’s student interactions. During the first semester she and David (Dreamy David I called him: he had bedroom eyes) appeared to be a unit. Though there were no PDAs, they arrived and left together every day, and always sat next to each other. Then, at the beginning of the second semester, a new student, Kim, joined the class and within days she had turned their duet into a trio, although not for long. After a few weeks, it was Kim and David who arrived and sat together, with Alissa now exiled two seats behind and a bit to the left of them: She could see their every twitch. They must have felt her watching their backs. By the end of the semester, Alissa was again sitting next to David, and Kim was floating solo around the last row of desks.

  This year, there were only five of us in the class, four from last year’s intro class: Alissa; Charles, a slender, blond Greek major who was now studying Latin as well; tall, gangly, midwestern Roger, the worst student from last year’s class, whose father was sticking to his guns and forcing him to take another year of Latin; and me. We were joined by Naftali, a smart, quiet, good-looking freshman who wore a confident expression that announced him to be the smartest boy in the class and, having already had four years of Latin at a fancy prep school, he was.

  As usual I was first in the classroom, and as the others arrived, Roger was the only one to greet me. The others focused on their cell phones. Alissa sat next to me, I suppose since I was the only other female in the room. Without saying hello or giving any sign of recognition, she began writing furiously in her pink notebook.

  Matthew Wright, our professor, was the year’s Blegen Scholar, an endowed one-year research fellowship, which required the visiting scholar to teach only one class per semester and give one lecture. Mat
thew was from Exeter University in England, a specialist in Greek and Roman drama, ancient literary criticism, and fragmentary and lost works. He loved the tantalizing snippets of Roman and Greek works that came down to us only through references made to them by their contemporaries. They are the obscure of the obscure, though there was nothing recondite about his personality. He was a tall, slender man, in his late thirties, who wore fashionable eyeglasses, a snappy pink dress shirt, tie, and tight blue jeans.

  He greeted us with the traditional Latin, Salvete discipuli, then handed each of us an old-fashioned, bound, green and grey notebook and a retractable pencil. How lovely! I thought they stopped handing out notebooks and pencils in second grade!

  “Scribite omnia quae dico,” he said. Now we students stole glances at one another, alarmed and mystified. Matthew repeated, slowly, with hand gestures of pencil writing in notebook, “Scribite omnia quae dico,” as we worked out that he was telling us to write down everything he said.

  He went on to dictate eight questions typical of “getting to know you” in a foreign language: where are you from, what are your hobbies, do you like music, what is your favorite color, et cetera, and ended by giving us a list of colors, none of which we’d learned the prior year. Matthew questioned each of us in turn: Quod nomen tibi est? he asked Charles, who answered hesitantly, Charles mihi nomen est.

  And there it was already: the dative of possession, which translates as, “Charles is the name for (or to) me.” Curtis had remarked upon the inordinate fondness of last year’s workbook sentences for this way of expressing ownership, which turned out to be lucky for us this first day of class. We all recognized the locution.