Vivir es ver volver: To live is to see each thing return.
Azorin
I went back to studying a little ancient Greek the other day. I got out my books and my notes and I started reading though the exercises I had translated and the phrases I had memorized. I was surprised to see that my last lesson had been completed ten years ago and that I hadn’t returned since then.
I took a semester of Greek back in college, but then I got sidetracked for a while and didn’t pick up the language again until 1988. When I dug my old text out of the attic that year, I found that I remembered almost everything, and that the notations in the margins seemed like I’d just written them the other day.
Over the past five decades, I’ve learned and relearned the Greek alphabet and 47 different phrases by famous authors, several hundred vocabulary words, the major pronouns and articles, and a number of verb tenses. I ultimately hope to be able to read the Iliad and the Odyssey in the original. At my current rate of progress, I might be able to do that (with a good dictionary) by the year 2340 when I am 400 years old.
Although I would have been discouraged by such a prospect when I was in school and theoretically had more time, I continue to look forward to Homer’s own words as though I might someday actually be able to read them with ease.
Of course there are a number of ways to look at all this. One way is to realize I could really not be very interested in learning more than a smattering of Greek. Obviously I am kidding myself about Homer. Another way to approach the matter is to think that I actually am interested in learning Greek because this study seems to be a recurring theme in my habits. And it does provide pleasure and is a source for reflection, and how could there be anything wrong with that?
But in addition to fueling rationalization and excuses, my persistent return to Greek has brought something to my attention that I hadn’t recognized so clearly before. I have noticed, of course, that as I grow older, time does seem to pass more quickly. What I hadn’t paid attention to, however, is that the acceleration of time creates an apparent shortening of gaps between events. What seems to young people to be long-term memory is really a condensed awareness of the past.
Over time, the lengthy space between certain kinds of events becomes less important, and the events themselves ripen and take on new meaning as they age. Complex, diffuse sequences become refined to high points, are abridged, critiqued, and shaped. As moments multiply and accumulate, they are transformed, winnowed and sifted, the chaff blown away, only the whole grain left behind.
This speeding time edits with an ulterior motive. It favors underlying ties, favors intent over visible, obvious action. For good or ill, it reveals the undercurrent. Repetition takes on new meaning; circadian and annual cycles lose their distinction.
And so my Greek text and workbook seem as fresh and relevant as they did forty years ago. The repeated beginnings are more than half of the whole, and they remind me of so many more threads that weave through my life, surfacing every month or year or decade like porpoises in a psychic sea. Touchstones, they tell me, are not static souvenirs. The periodic tides of passage wash studies, loves, and habits to their kernel, compress and bond intent and energy and space to homely unity.