Behind Infinity

Yesterday I went back to Toledo. The Honors Classical World classes go there every year, and although I’m not in CW this year (seeing as I passed it last year and everything) the Classics majors were invited to come along because there were seats on the bus. And that’s how Devin, Loretta, Jaquie, Adam, Amanda, Kate, April, & I (Aaron had “stuff to do”) ended up on the Toledo bus with “get out of class free” cards.

The Toledo museum is really quite nice, and it would have been well worth the return trip even if they hadn’t had a new exhibit. But right now they’re showing some artifacts recovered from Roman villas at Pompeii, so it was like a bonus prize. There were lots of beautiful, detailed wall frescoes. I wish I had frescoes on my walls. Also, lots of cooking pots and jewellry. And some manuscripts, one cool piece was a letter from a daughter to her mother that was pretty much complete (but I couldn’t read the script). Another fragment was a 1.5-inch by 1.5-inch fragment of an Archilochus poem. The 300-level Greek class had just begun reading Archilochus the day before, so it was pretty mind-blowing for us to see an actual piece of it. Devin, April, Adam, and I hovered around it for quite a few minutes, trying to figure out the words. “I think I see kai!” Ooooh, nerds.

After seeing the Classical exhibits we were able to go through the rest of the museum as well. My favorite part is still the impressionism room. I really could just sit and stare at their Monet’s 1922 Waterlilies painting for about an hour. I have a print of it on my wall at home, but it’s just a shadow of the color and depth of the original. The color just takes my breath away. Monet is teh coolz.

I’m really glad I had the chance to go on this trip. I’m really glad I went, because I was feeling really pressured this week and I had thoughts about skipping out and getting work done. But it was good to go, because it was very refreshing. Lately I’ve wondered from time to time, “Why am I studying this? Is it really that significant anymore?” Walking through the art museum was a reminder that yes, the Classics are still significant. Their influence was evident everywhere I turned, whether I was looking at impressionism or modern stuff. Sometimes it was an overt imitation, such as the art from the Neoclassical period. Other times the influence was more subtle, just a similar technique or composition, familiar shape, analogous use of color, perhaps a resonating theme. And art isn’t the only area where this influence still holds sway. Philosophy, literature, and language alike are each greatly impacted by Classical thought.

I don’t fancy an academic’s life, spending the rest of my career in some little library or darkened office nitpicking at and drawing correlations between ancient texts, trying to discover something new in something that’s thousands of years old and has been nitpicked and correlated by countless people over the ages. And I certainly don’t ever plan on reading Joseph B. Soldow’s 160-page-long book “The Latin Particle Quidem” or writing a comparable volume of indispensable literature. I don’t even want to spend my summers digging in ancient Roman baths like my friend Jacquie does every year. Though I have more than a passing interest in Classical thought and civilization, it isn’t an insatiable thirst to spend every waking moment engrossed in it. So in that respect, it might seem that my education in Classics is a total waste. (At least, that’s what my brother tells me all the time.)

But actually, that’s wrong. While I don’t want to be an academic or an archeologist, I do want to be able to read well and construe meaning from difficult texts. I do want to be able to think critically. I do want to be able to use language expertly. I do enjoy reading the New Testament in its original Greek. And someday if I don’t make it big in the horse world (haha! right…if = when in this case) I might even like to teach Latin or writing or history or philosophy to highschoolers or homeschoolers or both. And while I do get frustrated with the sometimes often pedantic nature of my chosen discipline, I do still believe that it puts me in the best possible place for each of these things.

Altogether, it was good to go on the Toledo trip and spend some downtime with my fellow prisoners students and our profs, just enjoying the cool stuff there was to see. I think the world would be a better place and we would all be better people if we went to art museums more often. But alas. That’s another topic for another post…