i took Latin for six years.

i started in seventh grade, because my father insisted. then i continued in high school. i took both APs (Virgil one year, Homer/Catullus the next). my senior year, my school had run out of official Latin programming, so i and the other Latin nerd, Dipanjan, hung out with our Latin teacher at Café Roma and pretended the read the Eclogues. really what we did, mostly, was gossip.

but this early rigorous training in conjugations and gendered declensions instilled in me a life-long appreciation for language. even dead ones. especially dead ones. there is nothing so beautiful in English that can't be said more elegantly, more beautifully in Latin. there were times, then, certainly not now, when i could read and enjoy Latin poetry without the mediation of translating it. i could just feel words, the language, the meaning - the pure sound of it in my mouth gave me pleasure. i could almost feel the essence of Rome. or so, melodramatically, i thought.

my favorite was Catullus. last year i started a novel about Catullus. i wrote a pop song based on one of his poems. the Sapphic one. there's something about him - his tone, alternating between joy, despair, whimsey and cynicism - which really resonated with me as a teenager. the mood swings, the intensity of feeling, the pasison - these lend themselves naturally to poetry.

and Latin is such a subtle language, prone to puns, multiple meanings, occlusions. like Japanese in that way. i developed flexibility in the brain, an ability to accept shifts and shades in meaning, a tolerance for ambiguity. i'm all for clarity in prose but sometimes, meanings can only be hinted at. the world, after all, is not black and white. it doesn't improve always from exposure to harsh light. some mysteries are best left in shadow.

i'm grateful to my father for decreeing that i should take Latin. it is because of him that i worship words today. an abiding respect for the power of the pen has not only been supremely useful to me, but it has offered some of my keenest pleasures. it was one of the gifts i thanked him for on his deathbed - the gift of tongues.

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, pater, ad inferias...
...atque in perpetuum, pater, ave atque vale.