I intend to learn Homeric Greek in 2010

My love affair with the Greek language began I suppose in 2002, my sophomore year in college. I say love affair, but that word denotes a two-way relationship, in which I love Greek and she loves me back. No. Not like that at all. I have loved and admired those funny-looking letters and the great poetry and philosophy they embody from afar, like a Medieval knight looking up from his charger at the indifferent maiden loitering at her bedroom window. In a Political Theory class we read some Greek Tragedy by Aeschylus and I was immediately hooked. I moved on to the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, read the epic poetry of Homer, and even read a little comedy by Aristophanes. To my parents most of these names I brought up at dinner conversations and on walks to the park only registered as exotic and further proof of my burgeoning intellect. To my young wife, they symbolized my slackening grip on reality.

After I graduated from college, I went to Berkeley to study at their Intensive Greek Workshop for ten weeks. The model fit exactly my personality. Why trudge through years and years of Beginning Greek, without any real intellectual rewards, when you can toss aside all balance and proportion from your life for a short season and jump ahead of the game. To anyone who is interested in an Intensive Summer Workshop, be it at Berkeley or some other college, there are a few things you should know. Although this is advertised as a beginner program, most the people who enroll are taking it as a refresher course. By about day two when I realized the class was moving at a far faster pace then I was able, I realized that the bright pupils sitting in the front of the class answering all of the teacher's questions were talking in the halls about how hard their first two summer workshops were, but now on the third they were finally getting the hang of it. Of the actual beginners to Greek, those that thrive are, in my humble opinion, linguistic geniuses. Either that or I am a remedially slow learner. I took German in college, and would safely place myself squarely in the middle of the bell curve in regards to language acquisition. I knew only one student in my state college German classes who I believe could have survived the Berkeley program. Sitting around me were top students from Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Yale. These special few, who came to beginners and left two and a half months later able to read Greek were simply smarter than I. I admit this now with pain, five years later, because at that time I had always believed that my natural talents in just about anything were equal to anyone else's. Yes, as I wrung my hands day in and day out, utterly bewildered by the translations seemingly everyone around me could immediately intuit, I began to loathe my classmates. I hated them because I hated my own inadequacy. On the first day the Workshop director told me privately that over half of the students would drop out. He said this with a smile of superiority looking out through his designer glasses at an imaginary classroom full of losers who couldn't learn Greek. I observed this sense of superiority and found it rather matched my own, and I smiled with him at those masses of simpletons who did not belong in the same classroom as he and I. Within a week my vision was shattered. As I moved closer and closer to the back of the classroom, and the Greek language moved farther and farther out of my grasp, I soon had to confront my status as a Greek loser and I left for Arizona a little more than halfway through the program. I was left so emotionally scared by the experience I have not opened a Greek book until only the last year.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned, though, was that I paid over two thousand dollars to study Greek on my own. This is the case with just about all of college. You pay thousands of dollars for an institution to set deadlines for you, which, if you had a little bit of self discipline, you could set for yourself.

And so, in the spirit of self-discipline, I embark upon my Greek Odyssey, having learned a few things and I hope with a greater chance of success.