A Student's-Eye Picture of Maytide

There are so many flowers and so much foliage out around the university buildings that walking to and from classes has become a detailed inventory: lilacs in blossom and buds — dark purple, white, and above all light purple, chestnut blossoms red and white, forget-me-nots, angelica or something like it in the underbrush, withered forsythia, honeysuckle or a blueberry variety with small and scattery pink flowers, the deep shadow in the streets from all the leaves thronging on the trees above them, herb-robert, white-flowered garlic mustard(?), dove nettles, common nettles, big pink clover, flowerless clover leaflets, daisies, seed-blown dandelions, and swathes of wisteria which fall like grape vines in a Mediterranean painting, very blue sky, very white clouds, and today a thorough grey cloud cover with some glimpses of sun. I looked for four-leaved clovers, and didn't find one, but instead saw a magpie strutting across a shortly cropped lawn.

Today there was the scent of mown grass, the ordinary whiffs of car exhaust and fuel, cigarette smoke, the racket of the construction beside the Silberlaube at the Fabeckstraße along with the Sahara-like yellow-brown dust, ringing bicycles, fuming sound of the U-Bahn trains at Dahlem Dorf, and besides all kinds of fragrances from the flowers and leaves and then from the different perfumes which people wore as they passed me.

A 'harlequin' ladybug loitered in the grass, an ant scrabbled over my book bag, two fruit flies or some cousin skittered over the book I was reading (Der Ewige Krieg, a translation of a book on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by Dexter Filkins). Though I didn't see a mouse again (once one saw me coming and, streaking across the cobble path, dove into one of the ring of holes in a manhole cover) I didn't really mind that; and otherwise there is a black cat which slunk across the Otto-von-Simson Straße into the brush at the corner to the Fabeckstraße once or twice in the winter, which I didn't see again either.

As for the classes, they began with a lecture on Iran during the Safavid period, then two hours of reading, then a seminar on the Moorish Science Temple and the beginnings of the Nation of Islam (where I really wished that this was my seminar last semester; because the professor was tactless but also very good at getting thorough background knowledge, detail, and thought out of us), and lastly a glorious hour and a half of Cornelius Nepos, describing the career of Hannibal. Cornelius Nepos is purportedly easy to read; I don't find him so, and the translation of almost every sentence, with the inbuilt challenge of transposing his Latin grammar into logical and fluent and accurate German, has about it the same doomed, untriumphant atmosphere. (The pauses before someone volunteers an answer to the professor's question have been epic throughout the year, also because the course is set up completely unrealistically with regard to how many verb and noun and other tables, and conjunctions, etc., one can cram down one's Strasburg-goose-like gullet without being given the time to understand the moods, tenses, etc. properly. The least justified uncomfortably long pause, which I have turned into a byword in this household, came at the beginning of the year, when the professor asked us for the definition of 'in.')