From 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. I was at the Rostlaube for my Latin class, wherein we were taught the perfect participle passive (e.g. arbor caesa est) and the 4th declension (e.g. manus, exercitus, senatus). We tamely cleave unto the textbook, so we read through and translated a reading from it as customary. This time it was a paragraph on Rome after Tarquinius Superbus — the father of the perpetrator of the Rape of Lucrece, I think, but it wasn't mentioned — was jettisoned and his friend, Lars Porsena, king of the city of Clusium, lay siege to the city. There were new words, like iussu (the ablative of iussus, and it translates I think as "by order of" e.g. the senate) and the aforementioned exercitus (army).
One of the sentences in the reading didn't appear to make sense, since it looked like a singular subject with a plural verb. So at home I asked J. (who has been toiling through school Latin for
Anyway, I arrived home rather grumpily, having waited too long for my uncertain temper to catch an U-Bahn train. Since then I have written a Lighthouse blog post, chatted with the family in the corner room perched atop the coal-fired stove, eaten and had tea and coke, and begun a little light reading.
In the U-Bahn, a busker sang something in Dylan mumble-English to the accompaniment of the guitar, and I was rather amusedly transported back to the 70s. I looked out for the moon on the way to and from my class, but none was to be seen, though the brightest star shone intently from its customary quadrant and I finally noticed the beautiful effect of the windows of the houses around the Rostlaube when it is too dark to see their façades. The interior illumination lends them a strange transparency — as in, you can't only see vaguely into the rooms, but the houses on the whole seem like modest two-dimensional shapes and as if there were a lot of room for trees and lawns and flowers behind them — and a lantern-like appearance. The effect even worked back at home, in the half-lit façades on our otherwise busy and loudly lit street.
Besides I stared into the cafeteria again, since the large area in the back where nobody sits except for the hundreds of chairs and tables and a couple palmetto plants inevitably creeps me out, and I keep expecting to see a corpse lying there, kind of in plain unseen sight, like in an early 20th-century factory or some other large building after hours in an Agatha Christie film. When I passed it at shortly after 6:10 there were still two or three people seated at the near corner; often there are more.
I've decided to skip the Foundations of Ancient History lectures, since I've lost the hope of gaining credit for them anyway, and they are sometimes worthwhile and sometimes not; and I didn't feel like learning about the philosophy of German idealism this week; so until Latin I had a free day to do nothing in particular.
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