I just began reading a book titled Long Live Latin, by Nicola Gardini, a professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. Just the title itself attracted me enough to buy the book (Flyleaf), haul it home and stack it near the top of the "to read soon" pile in my library.
Don't have a pile of books like that? I recommend you start one tomorrow!
Anyway, I am already struck by a passage in the introductory chapter, where the author lays out his argument for writing such a book and for why I should buy a copy, haul it home, and stack it near the top of my "to read soon" pile (His main argument is that Latin is far from "dead" and that the study of it, the learning of it, is anything but schoolboy drudgery. It is engaging in the history of one's own camp.):
[Latin to this day continues to serve a variety of civilizing, mainly literary, functions in our lives, if we care to know them]: giving order and meaning to the human experience through story and metaphor; broadening the scope of the visible by imagining potential worlds; forming and disseminating paradigms of thought and action; representing ideas and modes of living that are still resistant to, or already exist beyond, institutionalization; giving form to feelings and emotions and moral values; reflecting on justice and beauty, and constructing cultural centers out of otherwise distant and fragmentary communities; and, not least, uplifting a national language to the level of art. And, in doing all this, allowing for a particular kind of pleasure: the pleasure of understanding through interpretation.
And so, my friends at Wednesdays@One, I invite you to consider as you write your next poem how, thanks to Latin (and even if, like me, your understanding of it is barely rudimentary), you too are "doing all this" at once, and again and again.
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