And This Is Why I Read

Last night, I read my 30th book this year, not that I’m prioritizing numbers, but simply because I’m spending more time at it, reading a minimal fifty pages daily, and not just any book, but some of the best ever written, conglomeration of genres that have shaped my world, defined who I am, not the quixotic schoolboy of sixteen, rebellious, often angry, in pursuit of discovering who I was and, better, who I wanted to be, that best self, enlarged through awareness and sensitivity.

Today, a new book: Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry and the Imaging of a New World (2025), his moving tribute to the great poet and his myriad influence. I first read Blake as a university English major and he’s stayed with me as one of my favorite poets.

Blake taught me to see life as polarity, the mix of opposites, of their necessity to wholeness, like summer and winter, the sun by day, the moon by night, beginning and ending, “the marriage of heaven and hell” as he called their fusion, innuendos of Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV).

Thus began my odyssey with myth, paradox its hub, my later love for Keats and his “negative capability,” of opposites unresolved, my passage into Blake”s protégés, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Butler Yeats, Paul Nash, Iris Murdoch, counter culture artists Allen Ginsberg, Dave Bowie, and Bob Dylan.

Ahead of his time, Blake opposed slavery, championed social reform in poems like the “Little Black Boy”:

“…we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

Thus did my mother say and kissed me,
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:

Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,
To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me.”

I have cherished his profundity veiled in simplicity, his magnificent “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” (”Auguries of Innocence”):

I continue to rejoice in “Jerusalem,” England’s unofficial anthem, with its call to battle injustice:

“I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.”

Arrested for sedition, Blake was not a nationalist, but a champion of the ideals of the French Revolution. Not only opposing slavery, he was anti-monarchy and anti-Church of England, elitists out-of-touch with the laboring class.

My early reverence for Blake led me to seek out his grave in the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground of the London Borough of Islington, an unmarked grave he shared with others—meanwhile, the din of urban traffic that could not muffle an inner quietude of somber reverence.

Blake has been with me in all of life’s flux, an inspiration, a friend.

Reading has granted me converse with the best that’s been thought and said, new landscapes, new friendships, companions I have with me always, in the days and in the nights.

rj

The Fall of Jason Arday: Institutional Panic, Broken Vetting, and Academic Tragedy

Slender and youthful at 37, with chest-length hair and a gentle, affable demeanor, Dr. Jason Arday was widely popular among students and colleagues when he was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge in March 2023.

His hire made history. The child of Ghanaian immigrants, he was the youngest Black professor in the university’s centuries-old record, holding a prestigious seat alongside a Professorial Fellowship at Jesus College.

Yet, just three years later, Arday abruptly resigned.

Days after stepping down, on August 14, 2026, police found him dead at his Battersea, London residence under non-suspicious circumstances, a tragic end to a meteoric rise brought down by an escalating controversy over his academic credentials and personal backstory.

THE SHELVED INVESTIGATION
The unraveling began long before it reached the public. In September 2025, Jack Grove, a senior reporter for Times Higher Education, alerted by Arday’s extraordinary athletic claims, sent Arday three direct emails requesting a response to alleged instances of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis and journal publications.

Rather than addressing the queries, Arday hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, known for aggressive media litigation, and reported Grove to the Metropolitan Police for criminal harassment.

The Met spent four months investigating the journalist. In February 2026, an officer called Grove, ordering him to cease contacting Arday because the inquiries were impacting Arday’s mental health. Facing legal threats and police intervention, Times Higher Education shelved Grove’s draft article.

THE WHISTLEBLOWER AND THE BLOG POST
The story broke wide open through a different channel. In June 2026, an unnamed Cambridge faculty member, frustrated by what they alleged was an internal administrative cover-up to avoid a public scandal, approached Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge philosophy researcher.

Cofnas subsequently ran Arday’s 2015 doctoral dissertation through plagiarism-detection software and, in July 2026, published his findings on Substack, alleging extensive verbatim text duplication.

Cofnas was already a lightning rod for controversy. In February 2024, he had published an essay claiming that Black people possess lower average cognitive ability due to genetic differences, asserting that in a meritocracy the proportion of Black professors at elite institutions like Harvard “would approach zero percent.”

While a Cambridge University investigation concluded that Cofnas’s essay fell within lawful free speech under UK law, Emmanuel College severed ties with him in July 2024, citing the hostile environment created by his public statements.

Cofnas challenged his dismissal in court, but in March 2026, a tribunal ruled that while his philosophical beliefs qualified for legal protection, Emmanuel College acted lawfully in terminating his affiliation due to the disruptive impact and tone of his writings.

Despite Cofnas’s controversial background, his technical analysis of Arday’s text duplication was undeniable. On July 24, 2026, The Times published an explosive front-page exposé documenting passages in Arday’s dissertation that were identical or near-identical to previously published scholarship without attribution. Media scrutiny quickly spread to his published journal papers and his autobiography, which claimed he had remained non-verbal until age 11, illiterate until 18, and had run 30 marathons in 35 days.

RESIGNATION AND AFTERMATH
On August 5, 2026, Arday resigned his Cambridge professorship. In an open letter addressed to colleagues and the public, he maintained his innocence while pointing to the unbearable personal strain:

When I accepted the extraordinary honour of becoming Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, it was, without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life… Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack… The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love… This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.”

Following his death nine days later, his family expressed shock, stating that Arday was a “gentle man” who had been “subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse… by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.”

AN ACADEMIC EVALUATION
Who bears responsibility for this tragic aftermath? In academia, the appropriation of another scholar’s work is an unpardonable offense. In my view as a former academic, the evidence of Arday’s unacknowledged text duplication and hyperbolic biographical claims is beyond doubt. Multiple passages in his writing trace directly back to uncredited source material, while his personal timeline, progressing from total illiteracy at age 18 to a doctoral dissertation in his twenties without an established paper trail of remedial education, defies statistical reality.

The root of this tragedy lies in an elite university rushing headlong to project progressive credentials. Cambridge was under immense pressure to diversify. According to reporting by The New York Times (August 15, 2026), internal hiring documents reveal that the selection panel bypassed candidates with far stronger scholarly records, brushing aside early warnings regarding Arday’s work as “vile efforts” to discredit a rising Black scholar. In doing so, the university abandoned its primary duty: to act as an impartial arbiter of intellectual truth.

While it is imperative that we confront racism wherever it rears its head, when institutions substitute top-down equity of outcome for equality of opportunity based on individual merit, they do not defeat prejudice: on the contrary, they merely replace rigorous judgment with performance art.

By waiving standard vetting out of ideological panic or political ideology, Cambridge did not elevate Jason Arday; instead, it exposed him, elevating a vulnerable man to a height built on sand, leaving him defenseless when the tide of inevitable scrutiny came in.

This tragedy serves as stark warning for modern higher education. When universities lower the bar to purchase moral virtue on the cheap, the consequences are ubiquitous: real scholarship is devalued, public trust in academia is shattered, and the genuine, unassailable achievements of minority scholars are quietly cast under a shadow of institutional doubt.

Everyone gets a prize—until the bill comes due. Cambridge got its headline, the ideologues got their symbol, and Jason Arday paid with his life.

—rj

Reaching Back: The Child Within

It’s a funny thing how I sometimes reach back into my childhood for memories that yield comfort in older years, simple truths endowed with a wisdom that sustains.

I loved Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, smartly drawn from her keen observation of England’s rural landscape, reinforcing my deep affection for my fellow creatures. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter have been my buddies all the days of my life.

Along with them came the wild, staccato rhythms of Dr. Seuss and every volume of the Doctor Dolittle series.

Maybe I’m just waxing sentimental—I’ve always been a deeply feeling person—but in surfacing these forgotten memories, I feel reborn.

Here are several gems I indulged in just this morning, each granting its own quiet contentment. First, the anonymous lines of the children’s poem traditionally titled “The Polite Rabbit”:

I met a grey rabbit, at the top of the hill.
We both stopped to look, and stood very still.
But I didn’t scare him, and he didn’t scare me,
Because I was polite, and so was he.

Christina Rossetti captured a similar quiet kinship in “The Caterpillar,” tracking its transformation from humble crawler to exquisite butterfly, a reminder of how what seems simple can, given allowance, mature into unexpected beauty:

Brown and furry
Caterpillar in a hurry,
Take your walk
To the shady leaf, or stalk,
Or what not,
Which may be the chosen spot.
No toad spy you,
Hovering bird of prey pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.

The capstone for me since my youth has always been William Wordsworth’s celebratory poem of nature’s beauty, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—that supreme exemplar of poetry rendered in simple language, of “emotion recollected in tranquility”:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

I have since read every one of his several hundred poems—some better than others, but always granting solace.

Fortunately, great verse is still being written to guide our children and grandchildren on their life journeys. Take, for example, this marvelous stanza by Jeanne Willis, from her illustrated picture book, Wild Child    (2012):

They caught all the wild children, and put them in zoos,
They made them do sums and wear sensible shoes.
They put them to bed at the wrong time of day,
And made them sit still when they wanted to play.
They scrubbed them with soap and they made them eat peas.
They made them behave and say pardon and please.
They took all their wisdom and wildness away.
That’s why there are none in the forests today.

Talk about rearing conformist children, alienated from nature, taught never to draw outside the lines, never to rebel and find their true selves—wow!

Call it nostalgia if you like, but William Wordsworth got it right when he wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” that “The Child is father of the Man.”

By that, he meant that childhood’s gift of innocence and wonder amid nature’s plentiful grace helps define the adults we ultimately become.

I believe, like Wordsworth, that the child lingers within us. Recovering that child within, its capacity for wonder, to notice a rabbit on a hill, a caterpillar on a leaf, a field of daffodils dancing in the wind—these are not childish things to be outgrown.

Milton for Contemporaries

Many years ago, I took a graduate seminar on John Milton centered on Paradise Lost (1667), one of the crowning achievements of the English Renaissance. But it was another work—Areopagitica (1644), his impassioned defense of freedom of speech—that has resonated with me ever since.

Written in opposition to Parliament’s Licensing Order, Milton argued that truth is strengthened, not endangered, by being tested against error, a bold stance in an age when dissent could invite imprisonment or execution.

 Milton’s intellectual hero was Galileo. In Paradise Lost, he evokes the great astronomer when describing Satan’s massive shield:

“…the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views…”

The “Tuscan artist” is Galileo, whose telescope transformed humanity’s understanding of the heavens.

In Areopagitica, Milton recalls visiting Galileo at his villa in Arcetri, where the aging scientist lived under house arrest after being condemned by the Roman Inquisition for advocating the Copernican model of the solar system.

Forced under threat of torture to recant what he knew to be true, Galileo spent his final years blind and confined. I like to imagine that Milton’s visit offered some measure of consolation to a man whose only offense had been to follow the evidence where it led.

Today, speaking one’s conscience seldom risks imprisonment in liberal democracies, but it can still carry severe consequences: reputational ruin, professional ostracism, organized harassment, and targeted campaigns intended to silence rather than engage.

Public discourse, accelerated by social media, spreads these consequences with astonishing speed, rewarding denunciation far more readily than disagreement.

Our universities bear part of this responsibility. Among the intellectual influences that have shaped portions of academic life is Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, mentor of the New Left. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse proposed a striking inversion of classical free expression:

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

He made the practical implications explicit, advocating for the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.”

In Marcuse’s view, there are issues where “certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”

Whether one agrees with Marcuse or not, his framework represents a profound departure from Milton’s conviction that truth emerges through open contest rather than enforced orthodoxy.

I have no dog in today’s culture wars. Censorship has become an equal-opportunity temptation for both the Left and the Right. Battles over gender, sexuality, race, religion, history, and politics have produced book bans, withdrawn publications, disinvited speakers, removed art, renamed institutions, and ousted educators. The particulars vary; the impulse to silence does not.

Milton himself understood the cost of dissent. Like Galileo, he eventually lost his sight. Following his death in 1674, he was denied burial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner due to his support for the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. Buried instead at St. Giles Cripplegate, his grave was desecrated more than a century later by souvenir hunters who carried away portions of his bones as grisly relics.

Some may dismiss Milton’s model as anachronistic, but I remain convinced that falsehood is exposed by argument, not by prohibition. The remedy for bad ideas remains better ideas, fearlessly expressed.

History offers sobering reminders of what happens when enforced orthodoxy replaces open debate. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have always understood that controlling speech is the prerequisite to controlling thought.

America has never perfectly reconciled its ideals with its practice, which is precisely why freedom of speech remains indispensable.

We improve our republic not by silencing one another, but by arguing honestly, listening seriously, and trusting that truth has nothing to fear from debate.

As Milton wrote in Areopagitica nearly four centuries ago:

“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

—rj

Britain’s New Prime Minister Is An English Major

I hadn’t known that Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, is a fan of Philip Larkin—England’s premier poet since Auden. It aligns with Burnham having read English at Cambridge, making him rare among a long line of prime ministers.

I find that refreshing—not because English majors possess superior virtue, but because the finest literature is fundamentally moral in its urgings, even in unsettling works like A Clockwork Orange or Joyce’s Ulysses. As for poetry, moral resonance often defines its very existence.

Of course, Larkin has come under fierce attack, his published letters revealing objectionable racist and sexist views. It’s the familiar, troubling dilemma of separating an artist from the work.

I’ve just finished reading Sue Prideaux’s revelatory Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, with its unsettling account of his relationships with young native girls. Picasso physically abused several of his partners. Richard Wagner was a vehement anti-Semite, yet his music endures in our concert halls. Even foundational thinkers—Hume, Kant, and Hegel—harbored implicit racism, while Aristotle viewed women as flawed versions of men.

But back to Burnham. What does he see in Larkin? Will his affinity for the poet make him a more responsive leader, attuned to his nation’s pressing domestic needs?

This much is clear: Larkin possessed an extraordinary gift for bringing poetry into quotidian life, capturing present urgencies, human longing, despair, and the precise mood of the British landscape. I can still hear the train wheels rhythmically clicking along the rails, carrying newly married couples, in “The Whitsun Weddings.”

Larkin rendered poetry conversational and, in doing so, deeply palpable.

What better guiding text for a new prime minister than these lines from “The Mower”?

…we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Or from “Going, Going”:

Their kids are screaming for more
More houses, more parking allowed
More caravan sites, more pay.

Reading Larkin might just keep Andy Burnham anchored to the everyday lives of working people in an era of corporate autocracy, widening economic disparity, and self-interested oligarchy.

Larkin reminds us that ordinary lives matter, not a bad script for a new prime minister to follow.

–RJ

Water Over Smooth Stones: Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams

I hadn’t heard of Denis Johnson (1949–2017) until I read an Esquire article enthusiastically recommending Netflix’s 2025 film Train Dreams, an adaptation of Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same title.

I liked what I read—the story of a shy man, Robert Grainier, who finds words difficult. He arrives as an orphaned child in Idaho’s rugged panhandle at the advent of the twentieth century. A day laborer, he joins crews cutting giant timber and building massive railroad trestles; later, he founds his own venture, hauling freight across the Idaho wilderness by horse-drawn wagon. He falls in love. They have a child and build a cabin in the woods. Joy and grief follow.

The story transcends Grainier, who lives into old age as a witness to a vanished America we will not see again—a sweep of history moving from horses to railroads, cars, electricity, telephones, television, aviation and rockets into space.

I watched the film and read the novella, whose 117 pages go quickly. Directed by Clint Bentley and co-written with Greg Kwedar, the film stars Joel Edgerton as Grainier and richly deserves its critical acclaim, with several reviewers calling it one of the most moving cinematic works of the new century.

Nominated for four Oscars, the film fleshes out the book’s narrative. Page and screen offer apples and oranges, distinct yet equally absorbent and moving tellings, each capturing the life of a simple, everyday man carrying his grief with quiet dignity, portraying life’s randomness and impermanence through rhythmic sequences and soft-lit photography.

The book itself leaves no word wasted, flashing with lyrical intensity. Wolves howl. Sentry spruces keep watch, piercing solemn, low-wandering cumulus flotsam. Short sentences mirror time’s passage, moving like water slipping over smooth stones. The book ends, leaving behind a haunting lingering. Not surprisingly, critics have dubbed it an epic masterpiece rendered in brevity.

Johnson began as a poet and went on to write short stories, nine novels, a novella, and two plays. Train Dreams won an O. Henry Award, one of the top honors for American and Canadian short fiction, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Earlier, his Vietnam War novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award.

I now think of him as one of our contemporary best, agreeing with the critics ranking him alongside Cormac McCarthy in chronicling the American experiment, though doing it more gently, measuring what was gained against so much irretrievably lost.

rj

A Mary Oliver Poem I Hadn’t Resd Before

Mary Oliver was perhaps the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, whose nature-centered poems continue to reverberate.

Oliver’s gifts were different from Frost’s. She rarely pursued the subtle symbolism beneath his seemingly familiar surfaces or the double meanings hidden within his plain diction. Yet we continue to read her for a similar invitation: to find rest, not among our busy fellows, absorbed in the pursuit of the volatile, but in nature’s quietude—the bubbling stream, the scurrying chipmunk, the scent of pine, the intricate tapestry of a snowflake.

As always when I read her, a quiet solace takes hold. I grow tranquil, reminded that contentment is found not in possessions but in nature’s moods, even its thunder—in the sense that I, too, belong to something larger than myself, a continuity that neither time nor circumstance can annul.

My childhood returns: memories of a pine-scented grove, a whispering wind, a fox moving silently through the brush.

A few moments ago, I read an Oliver poem I had somehow missed, despite having read much of her work. It’s “What Can I Say,” one of her final poems, included in “Swan: Poems and Prose Poems.”

Once again, she beckons us to immerse ourselves in nature’s quiet wonders, to gather its gifts, and to discover grace by accepting its rhythms.

Her poems never insist; they invite. They ask us to linger long enough for the ordinary to become luminous.

Nature still speaks, if we’ll but listen. As Oliver reminds us, “the leaf is singing still.”:

“What Can I Say”

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

—rj

Censorship by Omission

I’ve just finished reading the proposed Texas State Board of Education reading list.

In fairness, it contains a number of worthwhile works that introduce students to foundational texts in American history and culture. Yet it is also unmistakably the product of a Republican-controlled State Board of Education, reflecting a distinctly conservative vision of what students should read.

Biblical passages appear at nearly every grade level, Nothing comparable is drawn from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or other religious traditions, despite the growing religious diversity of Texas classrooms.

Its political leanings are equally unmistakable. High school students encounter Margaret Thatcher’s “Eulogy for President Reagan,” Ayn Rand’s “What Is Capitalism?” (from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), and Thomas Sowell’s “Flattering Unction” (from The Vision of the Anointed).

Missing are serious countervailing perspectives that might encourage students to weigh competing ideas rather than inherit a single ideological framework.

Although students read excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” major literary voices are conspicuously absent. Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Sandra Cisneros. Prominent Asian-American writers are nowhere to be found.

Mark Twain is absent as well, conveniently avoiding the controversies surrounding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has likewise disappeared.

The proposed list, scheduled to take effect in 2030 if approved, has already been reduced from roughly 300 works to 200. Among those removed were The Great Gatsby, The Alchemist, The Hate U Give, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Even more striking is the absence of books published during the past half century. Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a riveting dystopian novel introducing middle-school readers to questions of memory, conformity, and moral choice—is missing.

So is Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a coming-of-age novel confronting trauma, mental illness, and adolescence.

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, one of the defining memoirs of twentieth-century America, is absent as well.

What remains is a reading list whose omissions reveal its priorities as clearly as its selections. This is less an exercise in literary judgment than an attempt to shape civic identity through selective reading.

The response has been swift. PEN America, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the American Federation of Teachers have all criticized the proposal.

While many states publish recommended reading lists, Texas’s carries unusual weight in defining what students are expected to encounter and, just as importantly, what they are not.

In the end, this is censorship by omission.

At a moment when reading proficiency is declining and many young people struggle to finish even a single book, schools should be placing in students’ hands works that ignite curiosity rather than merely satisfy ideological objectives.

Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down, for example, can be read in a single evening. A fifteen-year-old boy enters an elevator intent on avenging his brother’s murder; at every floor another ghost steps inside. The novel is impossible to put down, yet its real power lies in the moral questions that linger long after the final page.

The same can be said of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, the extraordinary true story of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, whose survival of a plane crash, weeks adrift at sea, and years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, becomes ultimately a story not simply of endurance, but of forgiveness.

A good book invites a conversation with its author. It excites. It unsettles. It enlarges the imagination.

Reading lists are, by necessity, adult constructions. But Alan Jacobs, in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (2011), reminds us that the deepest reading often begins elsewhere, not with official lists, but with curiosity.

The books that stay with us are frequently those discovered by chance, books that cultivate sustained attention amid the constant distractions of modern life.

—RJ

Keeping Up With The Greeks

When Christopher Nolan decided to film The Odyssey, he had no shortage of distinguished English translations from which to choose. From among them, he chose Emily Wilson’s, remarkable for its freshness, clarity, and contemporary English while remaining faithful to Homer’s poetry.

Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated The Iliad. Unlike some modern “translators,” whose work consists largely of revising earlier English versions, Wilson translates directly from the ancient Greek text. She is equally at home in Latin, a reminder of the extraordinary linguistic preparation classical scholarship once demanded.

That accomplishment is no small feat. Were Homeric Greek taught as a modern foreign language, its highly inflected grammar would make it among the most demanding languages to master, up there with Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.

Wilson also reads classical Greek fluently, the evolved language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Aristotle with its unique vocabulary and grammar.

My own acquaintance with the classical languages began in high school, where I studied Latin for two years. The curriculum offered four years, but I opted instead for French and German. Today, my old high school no longer teaches those languages, having replaced them with Spanish.

A few years later, I enrolled in an intensive eight-week Harvard summer course in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and language of the New Testament. Easier than Homeric or classical Greek, it nevertheless presents formidable challenges.

Our Australian instructor insisted that we learn Greek actively rather than merely decipher it. Instead of translating Greek into English, we were expected to orally translate English into Greek. With only ten students in the room, we couldn’t evade being called upon repeatedly to think, speak, and stumble in the language in real-time. That meant knowing where the accents fell for each word, often very arbitrary, unlike Spanish and Italian.

It was a demanding approach, but by the end of the course I could work through New Testament passages with little more than the aid of a dictionary. Most of that Greek has long since vanished, although I can still read the alphabet, which proved unexpectedly useful years later when I studied Russian, whose Cyrillic alphabet derives in part from Greek.

Impressed with my teacher, I asked him how long he had studied the classical languages. His answer has remained with me ever since: “Thirteen years of Latin; eleven years of Greek.” I was in good hands.

I’ve often regretted not keeping up with Greek, a language renowned for precision in contrast to English, whose richness often lies in words layered with multiple shades of meaning, wonderful for poetry, but often less exact. Reading Greek reveals layers of irony, structural symmetry, and philosophical nuance that disappear in translation.

Growing up in Massachusetts, one could spend a Saturday “junking” through secondhand bookstores and antique shops, coming away with Latin and Greek grammars for a dime apiece, evidence of the former preeminence of classical languages in the curriculum of schools such as Boston Latin School.

Long before my own time, that same New England landscape was shaped by minds saturated in the classics. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Plato in the original Greek, finding in those ancient dialogues the architecture for his own transcendental philosophy. His friend Henry David Thoreau famously carried his Greek text of The Iliad with him to Walden Pond, writing in Walden that true literature must be read in the language in which it was written—the ancient letters “carved out of the breath of life itself.”

Much of that world has faded. Outside a handful of elite institutions like Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Exeter, or in schools like England’s Eton, the sustained study of Latin and Greek has become increasingly rare. Wilson herself began studying both languages at Oxford High School, an independent all-girls school in Oxford before reading Classics (“Greats”) at Balliol College, Oxford, and earning her doctorate at Yale.

I sometimes imagine what it would have been like had I continued with Greek throughout my life: to read Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Homer in their own words, perhaps allowing my synapses to mount a quiet resistance to incipient forgetfulness.

I think, too, of modern writers like J.K. Rowling and Toni Morrison, whose formal classical training echoes structurally throughout their work. And yet, the figure who haunts me most is one who had to build her own door to the ancient world: Virginia Woolf.

Denied the university education her brothers received, simply because she was a woman, she taught herself Greek and continued reading it throughout her life. For Woolf, Greek was not an academic ornament, but a living intellectual companion shaping her prose, her essays, and her understanding of literature.

Each year I return to her magnificent essay, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), invariably lingering on her summarizing sentence:

“It is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, the confusion, the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”

—rj

A Dickinson Poem

I recently came upon this Emily Dickinson poem—one I hadn’t read before, yet find incredibly rich in resonance, crafted with immense subtlety. Understood most fully within its New England cultural context, it brilliantly nuances contemporary reflection as well in its strident humanism.

She remains my favorite poet:

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we dont believe
Does not exhilirate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate –
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

Briefly, the poem opens with the speaker’s affirmation that life is to be cherished precisely because of its transience. She refuses to feign belief in something she cannot embrace: the recompense of an afterlife.

The second stanza explains why, drawing on “ablative”—the Latin grammatical case denoting removal or “taking away.” To Dickinson, a conventional heaven is an “ablative estate” because it strips away our physical, sensory selves. (Intriguingly, “ablation” also carries a modern surgical definition of tissue removal, reinforcing this sense of loss).

Ultimately, the proffer of this sterile, diminished eternity only instigates an appetite “precisely opposite”: a heightened hunger for the sensory, mortal now.

–RJ