The Return of the Slog

This evening the academic week began again with one hour and forty-twoish minutes of Latin. Normally, in school and even in university, I spend the entire pedagogical session after the Christmas holidays mentally howling a dirge — of ennui and of fear of being despised by my fellow students and of discomfiture at the impending essay and project deadlines — as the deprived trees outside weep rain and hail and snow in sympathy. But this year I feel surprisingly unanxious and unbothered in face of the resumption of classes.

On the other hand much of the Latin class today whooshed over my head. As long as the Future I form looks like amabo I know where I'm at, but the passive forms and infinitive moods and the sinister transformation of ferre into tollere or whatever are an ineffable nuisance. Fortunately the verb tollere is at least familiar from the Lord's Prayer, where I always thought at first glimpse that it meant tolling of a bell somehow until I realized that no bell pops up in the text, and that I have never heard of a ringing lamb or of resonating sins of the world. We finished translating a truly gripping account wherein the Roman sheeple are confident at last that they will be saved from Catiline's vile and predatory schemes for the seizure of the reins of state.

Then the professor dismissed the class after we had completed what she considered a very apposite exercise, wherein we had to identify the future verb forms within a list of words, and determine a saying of Cicero's which was spelled out by the first letters of the verbs. The answer: Nihil agere delectat, which roughly translates to "It is enjoyable to do nothing."

On the way home the sky gave way for a gauzy glimpse of the moon (in an awkward transitional phase) and a star, like a mole, beside it; and a presumptive helicopter. On the ground I much admired the dark shapes of the mistletoe in the trees, the puddles, and the Christmas decorations which had been set up around the houses since I last visited. Somehow it made the houses seem like stations along the face of an Advent calendar, with the house numbers as the dates. There was a bang or wheeeeee of firecracker or firework here and there, too.

On the news ticker in the U-Bahn it was proudly announced that Berlin has 30,000 more tourist beds than New York. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, one of the major cultural centres of the world!!!