Grumpy Prognostications Recalling Pope's Dictum

On Monday the first classes of the new university semester will begin, so I have registered for one course and just selected the tutorial, and seen that the rest of them 'carry over' from the winter semester.

I will have:

Greek:
* Oral and Written Language
* Modern Greek Language System
* Conversation
(three classes with the same professor)

* Erotokritos and the Literature of Crete under Venetian Rule
* History of Cyprus and the Cyprus Problem

Latin:
* German-Latin

History and Culture of the Near East:
* Lecture: Literature and Sources
(i.e. surveys of Arabic and Semitic literature)
* Seminar: Genres of Arabic Writerdom

These all sound more impressive than they are. The real description should probably read: Greek: miserably dragging myself through incomprehension in Greek; reading things in the Cretan dialect which I couldn't translate in a million years except when the professor feeds us each word; finding out how much I don't know about Cyprus and never really will. Latin: writing really, really difficult exercises and trying to figure out how long I can hide the fact that I couldn't reproduce a single Latin declension paradigm correctly if I'd have to walk off a plank into a sharky sea for getting it wrong. History and Culture of the Near East: feeling generalities go in one ear and out the other, because if I've ever read a whole page of Arabic literature I'd be greatly surprised and I've no context in which to understand the development of the literary genres; feeling really, really ignorant and trying to gird my loins for the inevitable class presentation what with its necessity of bringing my knowledge on a subject from 0 to the point at which I can write a well-rounded, knowledgeable, and reasonably variably sourced essay which is respectable in the undergraduate university level about it.

The point is that I don't feel unusually stupid or unusually delinquent in attending to what is taught, but all of this makes me really aware that somehow I still couldn't sustain an intelligent conversation about any of my courses because there are so many sinkholes of ignorance strewing the terrain.

Pope's dictum, as mentioned in this blogpost title, is this famous one:

A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring