Behold an Israelite in whom there is no guile

I'm an innocent. In my online wanderings I used to find these essays all the time, and I guess I assumed, if I assumed anything, that some proud college student put them up for all to read. Only now am I finding out that they're free essays used for cheating. And, having been read the riot act in my composition class, I now believe that those who cheat are infinitely more innocent than I am. After every teacher has made you aware of the plagiarism checker at Turnitin.com, it seems almost a lovable quality in someone to cheat. Such a person cheerfully believes that he's the most trenchant force in his world, refusing to acknowledge that there are those who would inquire into his methods. If the world were made up only of cheating students and suspicious teachers, it would be a refreshing place.

Unfortunately, there are also people like me in the world, possessing neither suspicion nor villainy, and so the world plods the path to destruction. We're not so bad, we innocents, but we're doing murder on the balance.

Non poteram sine miraculo

Latin has made a Watson of me. I sit there, baffled, scrabbling over a sentence until I think I'll lose my mind. Then I turn the page for the translation and say, "How absurdly simple!"

Sometimes the most frustrating things are the ones that are right between your fingers, if only you could manage them.

[Edit: The title is bad Latin. It should be, "Non potero id facere sine miraculo." I think.]

Studeo, Studere

I must be a glutton for punishment. I'd be fine, I really would--relaxed and caught up and everything--if I hadn't decided to be a Classics major. As it is, we're freewheeling through Wheelock's at an alarming speed, and it's hard to study when you can't concentrate. I never can.

But it's interesting how studeo doesn't actually mean study. It means desire. The second meaning came about later. And I really do want this.

I just wish I could focus.

Disco, discere, didici

Veterans who had been in the form for terms said afterwards that there had been nothing to touch it, in their experience of the orator, since the glorious day when Dunster, that prince of raggers . . . had introduced three lively grass-snakes into the room during a Latin lesson. 

- P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith 

I'm taking a composition class at college, which feels like a waste of time to me. If there's one thing I truly believe I can do decently, it's slap a paper together. But there's a word the teacher likes to repeat, and I apply it here: kairos, the supreme moment. 

About one week into college, when I was walking around on the grounds, eyeing a metal statue, I realized something, which was that I no longer wished I'd saved the Psmith series for when I was a new student. It wouldn't have been the moment for it. 

I have a weird way of relating books to whatever I do, and I wanted, at college, to find a friend like Psmith. I spent the whole summer in happy daydreams of gaining the sort of companion who would help me toss interlopers out the back windows of studies. Granted, that type died with the English school, but there's always hope.

But the main reason I wanted a Psmith was that Psmith exists to ease a person into Sedleigh, and I was certain that my school would be a Sedleigh--pleasantly, decently dull. (I guess it is, though more on the pleasantly side at the moment. And if wearing loafers around the school grounds doesn't drive that home, nothing does, really.)

Scratch that. I thought the school would start out a Sedleigh and morph, as the nights lengthened, into that bank in Psmith in the City, just an endless drudgery and coldness. It never did. I like it still. Maybe I forgot that Mike, the main character, adjusts quite quickly to such settings, and it's only Psmith who turns his discontent into a disco and dances in it. (No, not really. Disco is deader than Psmith, but you know.)

So college, if you enjoy it, is not necessarily the time to be reading Psmith. I read it exactly when I should have read it, because the time to be reading Psmith is the spring and summer before, when you're anticipating college with a Mike-like groan, not super into the idea and worried it will cut into your cricket-playing time. Or, in my case, my reader time.

I feel almost like I'm violating a certain readerly privacy, writing this post. I love my Kindle, admittedly, and when mine broke again this past week I cradled it like Clara with her injured nutcracker, but I hate all this stuff with the Amazon company tracking your bookmarks and plastering your screen with ads. Used to be you'd duck behind a book and flip the pages if you wanted to go unseen, and now look at me, writing posts about what I read. I was going to do a series of posts detailing my short-lived love affair with the college library. I might even do it now, and have this be the first. 

But even if it isn't the moment for Psmith, and even if I should be putting him aside and studying, I find myself thinking of him and his antics in the middle of my classes and having to stifle a smile. He's the lively grass snakes in my Latin lesson.

I'm gonna sing a song to you and I refuse to make it fake

College continues. I find myself on a perplexing new schedule where I want to sleep suddenly at three or four in the afternoon, and then I have to resist the urge to drink my tea at seven. I come early for my lectures and sit in the dark theater, tapping my fingers on a paperback copy of The Odyssey, my mind wandering from the subject of the morning's sermon at daily Mass to whether or not those sounds I heard could possibly be rats. I develop a weird affection for the speakers in the cafeteria, which are always playing some dippy song along the lines of Whoa, I swear to you, I'll be there for you, this is not a drive by-y-y-y-y. I seem to tremble beautifully on the brink of figuring out this Latin thing.

Clair, seeing that I'm busy, has enlisted Mary as her new cartoons-in-the-evenings buddy. As I work on my latest summary essay and hear them in the other room, laughing their heads off over The Regular Show, I wonder if there's room here for some pithy aside about Lost Innocence. (Hey, we're studying Genesis. Maybe I could work it in.)

Doesn't really matter, though, that I'm not an active cartoon-watcher anymore, since at literally any given moment, the question is not so much whether I have a song from Adventure Time stuck in my head as which one it is. I walk from this building to that hall and people don't know that I'm walking to the strings of an invisible ukulele, mentally singing a song that makes zero sense outside the context of the scene in question:

So Finn and Jake set out to find a new home,

It's gonna be tough for a kid and a dog on their own,

There's a little house, ah, Finn's sticking his foot in,

Well that's a bad idea, dude, 'cause now that bird thinks you're a jerk, Finn.

And now they're chillin' on the side of a hill and thinkin' livin' in a cloud'd be totally thrillin',

Unless they find something inside,

Like a mean cloud man and his beautiful cloud bride.

A beehive, oh no! Don't stick your foot in there, guy,

Y'all tried that before, and you know it didn't turn out right.

Perhaps I'll never really grow all that old.

(Aside: I'm way more opinionated about Adventure Time than I should be. In case you're familiar with the show, my issues specifically have to do with my loathing for toilet humor, combined with the fact that they totally jumped the shark introducing that "Flame Princess" character to be Finn's new love interest. If anyone wants to debate me, I'll take them.)

It ain't all satin / And silk, this Latin

It's hard to know what to even write about anymore, because a lot is going on. I'm a college student now. Navigating a campus, lugging my books from building to building, taking a million notes, the works.

I'm also a commuter, and thank goodness for that. I'm simply not a dorm-dweller by nature. I need to recharge. I've decided that a shift in scenery is the secret to stimulation. (Also, I have this new college laptop, and if, after my studying, I couldn't use it to watch cartoons with Clair, I'd cry.)

But yes. Latin is a tricky business. I'm only just starting it, and I've been made aware that what I've signed up for is essentially a slow broiling in conjugations. I must prepare myself either to become gradually stronger or to experience a premature decline. (Decline! "A, ae, ae, am, a, ae, arum, is, as, is!")

In one of my crazier moments I developed a theory about British accents. In every English book you read, the characters are just about drowning in caffeine. They think it's perfectly reasonable and normal to have tea in bed, then go downstairs and have breakfast with a pitcher of coffee. Imagine drinking one type of caffeine to work your way up to drinking another type. (That's not even mentioning all the stress-induced whiskey-mixing that goes on in Jeeves and Wooster. No wonder this is the civilization that came up with Alice in Wonderland; their solution for everything is to find the right thing to drink.)

Thus I conclude that a British accent is like an app on a phone. Its constant use drains battery life faster, and the only cure is near-constant caffeine.

Taking this as a hypothesis and following it to its logical conclusion, no wonder these books always depict the Romans looking all bulky and muscular. Merely speaking their own language was the world's most efficient workout.

And, just as the bird too weak to crack the egg would surely perish outside the shell, those who can't lift their copy of Wheelock's Latin have no hope whatsoever of surviving the course it suggests.

[By the way, I'd just like my readers to appreciate the fact that I wrote this entire post without once using that cliché old joke about "it killed the Ancient Romans and now it's killing me." I bet it occurred to you, though.]