A New Beginning

It's the night before my first day of normal classes at the FU — one is an art history lecture, and the other an introductory Latin course which I intend to audit this semester and properly take the next. So I will be gone most of the afternoon and evening.

On Saturday I sent an email to the professor in charge of a paleontology work course at the university; depending on the response I will be part of a group learning how to archive and preserve remains from a prehistoric dig every Friday. Since I have wanted to do that since before I was ten years old — and, if it isn't congenial after all, I'm happy to have a chance to test it — it is feverishly exciting.

In general I feel pleased, bent on getting my way (as in taking the courses I want to take despite scheduling obstacles), and nervous.

***

Updated:

The first lecture was a fizzle, since I left the bookshop in time, found the building without difficulties thanks to my habit of drawing little diagrams for myself (a habit inculcated by unhappy events relating to past job interviews), and found the proper room by a stroke of luck. It appears to be a fairly large lecture, too, which makes me happy because I like being an anonymous student and not having to do group work or talk to people unless one or both of us feels like it. But as the hour struck, a student came into the class and said that the lecture had been cancelled for that day.

So I went all the way back to the bookshop again and was there to greet Mama when her time came to take over. The prehistoric archaeology professor has answered my email and said that it would be fine if I participated in her work course, if I am really interested in washing and labelling finds. So I went to the campus in the middle of pleasant suburbia, via a "long and leisurely" bus drive through the incipient rush hour, to "scope out" the terrain. Instead I found, to my howling dismay, that there was a compound of some thirteen buildings in which the course could be held. In fact the identity of the building was revealed in the course index, but I had foolishly skipped it over as an irrelevant detail. One of the buildings I went into didn't have the tentative room number — it had the room number before and the room number after but not the one in between, which left me figuratively hopping with suspense. But now I know the right building and that was not it. The date of the first meeting is also unknown and will be revealed through an "Aushang," which apparently means an update to the institute's website.

Then, somewhat disgruntledly, I travelled back to the U-Bahn station Dahlem-Dorf and betook myself in search of the Rost- and Silberlaube for Latin. This is a huge building which appears to be the core of the campus in terms of teeming with students. I looked for the Habelschwerdter Allee in vain on the U-Bahn map, but being fairly certain that it was down the railroad tracks and then left, and being confirmed in this by a sign, I went down to the Thielallee (pronounced roughly teal ull-lé). I entered the Laube, still not knowing where the Habelschwerdter Allee is, though it must be admitted that it wouldn't be difficult to find out.

If the belt of a treadmill were ever stretched out to represent the true distance which one walks on it, the corridors of the Rost- and Silberlaube would correspond to it in terms of length and of the feeling of futility which it instills. The room numbers are e.g. xx/xxx, in which the first xx indicates which cluster of rooms is meant, and the first x of the xxx indicates the floor number (1, 2, 3). My cluster was for some reason dark. I may be exaggerating, but it seemed like the only light was coming from inside the rooms, the exit signs, and the neighbouring hallways. For some reason that also really peeved me, though from an environmentalist's perspective I salute it.

So my Latin class convened in a horseshoe of desks which filled, and filled, and filled some more. After minutes of entering, seating, chatting and finally befuddled silence, the professor arrived and said, bravely, that it was interesting how the computer system told her there were twenty-three students in this class and how it strangely appeared that there were rather more, and then cheerfully and I think a little nervously launched into her first lecture. She was wearing black jeans and a blazer, reddish hair loose, appears to be in her 40s, has a warmth which I think comes from Polish or Czech parents, and has quite a nice voice and interest-retaining teaching style though I find her grammatical elucidations rather confusing. But I was in a straight-out bratty mood and rather peeved that we were covering material I had already learned on my own; and the Domina ancillam vocat sentences were a base "homage," I indignantly thought, to the old German Latin staple Ludus Latinus.

Anyway, we learned the hoary basics — that one can play around with the word order in Latin, that the nominative case applies to the subject and the accusative to the object, and that many words ending in -us are part of the o-declension and that words ending in -a (except, I thought with dim recollections of textbook paradigms returning, for the neutral plural) are part of the a-declension. There was some interesting stuff about where to emphasize words, involving long and short vowels; it was altogether very close to the Ancient Greek quirks which I know and therefore love, and did not love all that much in the process of having to prod my brain into getting to know them. I want to make vocabulary flashcards but I feel tired. Maybe tomorrow — after my packed 8 a.m. - 2 p.m. schedule is over.

Then I went home in the pitch dark, which made me a very unhappy camper. But on the whole I figure that I will grow more of a backbone if there are petty daily discomforts to grapple with and the lesson learned how to deal with them with sense and some small measure of dignity, though grumbling has also been fun. I've taken a shower and made my bed, and now I intend to rest in it; and that feels inspiriting.