Meeting the last man on planet earth who could speak Latin
This moment impressed on me more clearly than ever that language is a function of individuals. The warmth, respect, and sense of fun that Fr. Foster radiated--especially toward me, a bumbling college student of no special experience in Latin--was crucial in undercutting his words. You cannot learn a language without getting to know a great deal about your teacher or students. Speaking a language is scary. Those of us who teach foreign languages have an awesome responsibility, and the power, to set our students at ease.
And with a single sentence, he taught me an unforgettable lesson in how to answer a question in exactly the right way.
A single question changed the course of my life.
When I first began studying Latin in 1996, it was a dead language, no doubt about it. It was pointless to try to speak it; everyone agreed the grammar was just too hard.
Legend had it, though, that a single man—a priest, somewhere in Rome, Italy—could do it. The last man alive who could speak Latin! I had to find him.
And after endless blind turns, I did. It was spring 1997, and I was spending the semester abroad in Rome.
I got up very early one morning because the immortal Reginald Foster—papal secretary of Latin to four popes—agreed to stop by on his way to work at the Vatican.
Not knowing what to expect, I opened the classroom door to find a man dressed as if he’d come to repair the dishwasher. He was sitting down and smiling widely.
“Can you really speak Latin?” I whispered, terrified.
He grinned wider and shot back, “Quid, tu censes me heri natum esse?” (“What, do you think I was born yesterday?”)
That did it. That absurd outfit, that warm grin, that exuberant and virtuoso reply—that all settled it. I’d found my guru.
This moment impressed on me more clearly than ever that language is a function of individuals. The warmth, respect, and sense of fun that Fr. Foster radiated--especially toward me, a bumbling college student of no special experience in Latin--was crucial in undercutting his words. You cannot learn a language without getting to know a great deal about your teacher or students. Speaking a language is scary. Those of us who teach foreign languages have an awesome responsibility, and the power, to set our students at ease.
And with a single sentence, he taught me an unforgettable lesson in how to answer a question in exactly the right way.
Spring 1997
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Michael Fontaine,</a> 40, professor of classics at Cornell University
meeting-last-man-on-planet-earth
Photographing Rome
When I was 5 years old, my family and I gathered around the Christmas tree bright and early on Christmas morning. I was more than excited when I unwrapped a small handheld camera that was pink and orange, and about half the size of a dollar bill. The screen on the camera was less than half an inch wide and tall, and the camera could only hold about 3 photos at a time. Still, I was ecstatic. I would walk around the house and take pictures of my family, and then delete them right away so I could take a couple more. This planted the roots for my love of photography. On a trip to Italy, that love blossomed.
Around the time I was ten years old, my family and I decided to stop doing presents for Christmas and take vacations instead. This became one of my favorite traditions very quickly. In 2018, we took our first trip to Europe. We spent a majority of the time in Italy, specifically the Rome region. We decided to stay around there because the art and architecture was inspiring. Before the trip, I decided to purchase my first DSLR camera. I practiced using it for the weeks leading up to the trip, but the trip felt like some kind of final exam. It felt like a test that I had been studying for for weeks, and this was my chance to prove my knowledge.
I fell in love with Italy after one day of being there. The pasta and gelato was definitely a factor, but there was something about the energy and the culture that really just changed me as a person. It was my first big exposure to a country outside of North America. Every day we were there was a learning experience, but I didn’t want to let the time just slip through my fingers. I knew at this moment that this was my test. Yes, it was a test I assigned to myself. But I knew that I had to find a way to capture the feeling I was experiencing over there.
Less than a week into our trip, we decided to take a tour called “Rome in a Day”. We started at a small coffee shop in the shadows of the Colosseum. We walked around and through all of the big architectural landmarks. We would spend about an hour at each location, then leave to check out a new city, museum, or town square that was historically famous. There was something humbling, grounding, and almost magical about being right next to the Colosseum. I had seen it in photos, but the photos were nothing like what I experienced.
So I pulled out my camera, adjusted the settings, and began trying to recreate the scene exactly as I was experiencing it. I did this at every structure or town that we went to. I wanted to focus on getting everything from my perspective, because it was a powerful experience to me. Being in a country where they don’t speak English, and my Italian was far from understandable, it was comforting to see everyone taking photos from different places. While everyone’s photos would turn out different, it felt unifying to know that we were all connecting through the click of our cameras. We all had one thing in common, and that was that we never wanted to forget that moment.
Throughout the rest of the trip I continued to take many many photos. At the end of each day, I would go back to our house and spend hours looking at them and editing them. The photos I took in Rome are still some of my favorites to this day, and I could say the same about that vacation. Rome was magical. Photographing it was even more magical.
Rome, Italy
December 2018
Hayley Susov, HS Senior
photographing-rome
Reflections on the Banks of the Tiber
Like so many significant events throughout the history of the Western world, my humanities moment begins on the banks of the River Tiber in Rome. I had just crossed the Ponte Sisto bridge and was standing at the crosswalk to Piazza Trilussa in the Trastevere neighborhood. The sky was crystal clear and had the color of deep blue topaz, and the sun was bearing down in an unforgivable blaze. Only three minutes prior I had been hellbent on making it back to my AirBnB as quickly as possible; I desperately needed an hour or two of rest and relaxation in air conditioning.
But the Tiber pulled me back.
I asked my spouse Brandon if he minded my turning back to get a photo. Ever the Type-B match to my persistently Type-A personality, he said it was no problem, even though I know he was just as ready to be back our apartment as I was.
I approached the bridge’s short wall and gazed out. The river was moving at an even pace, but its motion looked lazy in comparison to the times that I had visited Rome in the spring—when the snow from the Alps melted into the tributaries and flooded rivers like the Tiber with a rush of new life and renewed possibility.
I recalled a Horace poem that I read during a summer Latin language-learning intensive I attended three years prior. It was not a particularly inclusive environment. The institute taught Latin via the nineteenth-century-style grammar-syntax model, demanding its students to learn the language, not as a vibrant cultural milieu brimming with life and storytelling, but as if it were a mathematical equation to be decoded and solved. In this program, there was no room for nuance.
As a burgeoning literary scholar, I struggled with this model because my entire academic career had been built on the notion that meaning and context are fluid. So, when I encountered one of Horace’s Carmina describing the Tiber as yellow, I was baffled by the adjective/noun agreement. Bordering frustration, I asked an instructor of the institute, and he casually (and not a little derisively) explained that if I had ever been to Rome, I would know that the river looked yellow.
Having not had the resources to travel abroad in well over a decade, I felt ashamed, small, and provincial. It was July 2016 at this time, and the preceding August I lost my mother to a long-term illness that none of us knew she had. Her passing was quick, but the grief stuck around. This instructor’s condescension cut deeper than my ineptitude at translating Latin poetry. It felt like an indictment of my life, the choices I made, and the opportunities that had not been afforded to me.
The only amelioration was my summer study group that year, the group of underdogs that kept me tethered to the Earth and from going completely mad.
(I should note, we were the underdogs not because we were somehow lesser than intellectually, but because we were all pursuing advanced degrees in higher education. We all were also, it should be known, the only students in the entire program who fit into some category of “minority” student; we were either female, or BIPOC, or LGBTQ+, or first-gen, or a combination of all the above. But we persisted, and all of us managed to hobble over the finish line after three months of intensive study.)
When I saw for myself the yellow tinge of the Tiber last summer, this pedagogical memory came flooding back to me.
But instead of feeling sad or sorrowful, I felt empowered—vindicated, even—because I was in Rome for a professional reason. I was invited to present a paper at the European Shakespeare Research Association, an experience that would eventually lead to my first peer-reviewed publication the following spring. The inclusivity I felt in that moment resonated greatly with me.
Unlike my experience three years prior, my voice was valued and sought after. I mattered.
My education and language-acquisition struggles being what they were, it gave me perspective. Yes, I can see for myself now that the river looks yellow. It is a beautiful sight, to be sure, but the yellow river is not all that different from the brackish waters I grew up with in Mississippi.
I can guarantee, however, that I will convey this piece of trivia in a more accessible way to my students, those like myself, who a few years prior was someone with little cultural capital but the rapacious desire to research, to learn, and with a little help of my friends, to lift myself out of a life that felt inescapable.
Tiber River in Rome, IT
July 2019
Alexander Lowe McAdams, literary scholar and dedicated pedagogue
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