Spiral Downward--One Essay

Every generation educates its young people in a way that is calculated to build the society and inculcate the values most desired that society. Only problem is, in the case of my generation, the rules/values changed right in the middle of my formal education. I grew up with the expectation that I would study Latin in high school, be a lifelong church-goer, wear a tie on Sunday mornings even as a high-schooler and, in general, continue the family traditions of "math-based" professional life. However, once I got to Brown University in Fall 1970, the rules, seemingly, had all changed. In addition to the traditional disciplines, we had "Modes of Thought" courses (whatever that meant) and interdisciplinary seminars without end. Instead of an intense Fall semester, we had a ten-day vacation late in October to campaign for our favorite candidates. Since only about 15% of the students at Brown were from RI, and very few of this 15% had the Mob-related connections that were helpful in RI politics, most of us treated the Fall break as a time for general mayhem or exploration of the world. Instead of persisting with my math courses (I was within two courses of achieving my major by my sophomore year), I decided to throw it all out for God--i.e., religious studies.

Yet, something very significant from the earliest days of my most traditional and classical education never left me. Somehow I felt, and still feel, that I ought to memorize the Iliad in Greek and the Aeneid in Latin; that I should spend my best hours making sure that my ancient languages are neatly polished and ready to be displayed for the vast hordes (i.e., no one) that wants to see them. But I didn't realize the built-in conflict of those two kinds of education until I did the quintessential expressions of those two approaches to learning in this past week: (1) rereading (in Latin) Cicero's First Oration against Cataline; and (2) reading Philip Roth's racy 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint. Let me show you how my neatly ordered world became unraveled this week through combining these two tasks....

First, Cicero

I tell you a secret. I discovered a scholarly article from the 1880s which mentioned what was required 125 years ago in Latin knowledge to pass Latin placement exams at elite colleges. In addition to having to know Caesar and Cornelius Nepos, one had to have learned eight orations of Cicero, about 300 lines of Ovid, five or six books of the Aeneid and scattered other things (Sallust, a little Livy, etc.). This lays out my Latin task for the next year or so. Got to be as good as people from the 1880s...Well, I decided to attack the Cicero part of it by buying an old Latin III (HS) text, from the early 1960s, before the world changed, and then read and study it closely. But my obsessive self didn't let myself stop there. I had to order from Interlibrary loan an 1899 edition of the 'completely parsed' series, where a 250 page book gives us a word-by-word, parse every word, translate every thought edition of the First Oration against Cataline. I was in heaven as I eagerly read about various obscure noun and verb forms. For the first time I had the feeling that I was understanding every word of Cicero. However, as I did this, I began to wonder why I should do this; much of his oratorical stuff is blatant self-promotion (especially in the Third Oration), and lots of it just introduces a vocabulary of obloquy (attacking Cataline and his friends). Yet, I was finally feeling that I was taking apart the language one word at a time. And then, I made a discovery....

I was reading along in the Latin III reader, and Cicero was really trashing Cataline. Here is one sentence:

"Quae libido ab oculis, quod facinus a manibus umquam tuis, quod flagitium a toto corpore afuit?"

"From what type of lust have your eyes been free, from what crime have your hands been at all free, from what infamy your whole body?"

Ok, got it. Trash away. Then, Cicero continues, in the Latin III book:

"Quid vero? Nuper cum morte superioris uxoris...

"What then? Soon after making your house empty with the death of your earlier wife...."

I was buzzing along nicely, checking out the "completely parsed" version as I went, to see if there were any nuggets I ought not to miss, when I was caught up short. The "completely parsed edition" of 1899 had a sentence that seemingly had been left out by the Latin III text, just before the "quid vero?" above. It read:

"Cui tu adulescentulo, quem corruptelarum illecebris irretisses, non aut ad audaciam ferrum aut ad libidinem facem praetulisti?"

I thought at first that the HS text had left out this sentence because it was "too difficult"--i.e., the editors wanted to have mercy on the reader, and so eliminated it. But then I worked through it. Cicero is still berating Cataline:

"To which young boy, whom you have caught in your net by the lusts of corruption, have you not reached a sword for his audacity or a torch for his lust?"

Indeed, this was meant to be the coup-de-grace, the ultimate insult to Cataline. But the text that the high schoolers used to learn Latin, and which I was now using for review, didn't have this sentence. Then, it dawned on me. Of course, the text was edited in the early 1960s. The world was different then. Young boys and girls reading Latin were not even supposed to have the idea cross their mind that an older man would have the slightest lust interest in a younger man [frankly, I don't know how you can study ancient Athens if you ignore this...but, of course, we do]. So, sex was off the table in 1962 and the following years of the 1960s until Latin itself, by and large, went out the window. Now Latin is back, though I don't know how much of Cicero is there...

My Downward "Spiral" Dawning on Me

So, my "conservative" and classical education was a sexless one--just narrating bold statements of manly oratorical style which I was to learn. But by the early 1970s, everything in the culture was sex. It was in the movies, for the first time; it was in significant pieces of literature; it was all around me on campus (even as I turned my nose down at it). But even though I ignored it and continued to try to live as the conservative "classical" boy from CT, I think the new world took a deep bite out of me and said, as it were, "you are not going to go through this period unscathed, Bill. Especially since, ultimately, you will want to be part of the world in which you live." So, I lived in inner conflict for the next 30 years, a conflict by and large unexplored. Now, with the "expurgated" Cicero and Portnoy's Complaint in the same week, I am aware that the "sex" part of the late 1960s and 1970s wants fully to be noticed in my life.

So, what do I do? I have to provide space for it. I will do so not only by reading about it (Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is next), but by, somehow, trying to "wed" the possibly incompatible worlds of the early 1960s, when my commitment to learning was shaped, and the 1970s and beyond, when a commitment to pleasure was encouraged. I think I am still confused by how to "integrate" or "celebrate" the two, and so I spiral downwards as, on the one hand, I work through the forms of the supine in the Latin while, on the other hand, I laugh uproariously at the masturbatory and romantic impulses of Alexander Portnoy. No time for "work" when I have to sort out this issue. And, just think...it was the little omission in my Latin III book that brought all of this to mind to me tonight....

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