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notes from the edge

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As far as I’m concerned, autobiographical accounts lie somewhere between horn tooting and Hitlerism, in that both of them involve unwarranted self-glorification. There are a few people, like Katharine Graham, for instance, who have every right to toot their own horns because they’ve been trailblazers of one sort or another. Then there are others, like Socrates, who should have written autobiographies, but didn’t, relying rather on the willingness of people like Plato to do the job for them.

But most of us are not of the ilk of Socrates, and the Platos of the world are long gone, to be replaced by such philosophical offshoots as Nietzsche or Sartre, and who would want either of them to write one’s biography?

The fact is that the majority of us are like miners, wandering around through the shafts with but the dimmest of lights on our helmets. But somehow we make it from the beginning to the end, and usually with the help of, as Blanche DuBois says, the kindness of strangers.

Luckily or unluckily, most of us have or had parents who thought it was their duty to go forth and populate the earth. For some, like Oedipus, this didn’t turn out too well, since he wound up killing his father, and his mother committed suicide when she found out that incest wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The only plus in all this for Oedipus was that he could slough off the murder of his father by saying that he didn’t have a choice when it came to being born. If he had, he would have said thank you, but no thank you, since, if he’d never been born, he wouldn’t have had all those parental problems.

Thankfully, I had a much better relationship with my parents. They were people of the great depression, and things were tough, but somehow they managed to keep it together and became devoted worshipers of Franklin Roosevelt.

I went through the public school system in East Orange, New Jersey and spent most of my free time wandering the inner sancta of the New York Public Library and the old Metropolitan Opera before I became a devoted worshiper of Harry Truman.

In fact, it was in high school that I met the person who most shaped my life, and he was, of all people, my Latin teacher. His name is C.Howard Smith, and he’s still alive and reading Horace at the age of 92. Not only did he instill a love for Latin in me, but he taught me classical Greek on the side, and that was about it, as far as I was concerned. From there I went to the University of Pittsburgh, where I majored in Greek, and thence to New York University, where, in 1965, I received my PhD in Classics, again with an emphasis in Greek literature and language.

At the end of the year in which I graduated from NYU, a position in what was then called the Department of Ancient Languages opened up at the College of William and Mary, and I was lucky enough to be chosen for that. And there is where I’ve been for the last 36 years, teaching mostly courses in Greek language and literature and comparative literature. My research has been in the area of the classical tradition, or, more precisely, the influence of Greek literature on later writers of tragedy, comedy and the short story.

But, 36 years is enough in any line or work, and so I retired at the end of the 2001 academic term.

People, of course, don’t want you to retire. In fact, they don’t want anyone to retire. Even if they’re retired, they keep asking you, “What are you going to do?” To do? I thought that retirement meant that you didn’t have “to do” anything. And so, when they asked me what I was going to do, I would reply “nothing.” But that was obviously unacceptable. “You have to do something,” they would say. And I wondered: Why? I’m retired! I don’t “have to do” anything. So, to fend off the “to do” people, I began saying that I was going into dentistry, or maybe taxidermy. But they knew that I was probably going to do nothing, and that really upset them.

One of the people who asked me what I was going to do is Bill O’Donovan, the editor and publisher of the Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg, Virginia. I’ve known Bill for several years, and we’ve become part of the sauna rat crew at the county recreation center. I’d also written several letters to the Gazette, in one of which I took out after those who were whining about Bill’s political endorsements. I indicated that I thought Bill was one hell of an editor and that we were fortunate to have him and a paper of the quality of the Gazette in this area. And I still feel that way.

At any rate, after I retired, Bill offered me a chance to write a regular column about local political and social issues, and I accepted. And I must say that I couldn’t have found anything better than this “to do” in retirement. Writing for a newspaper, of course, is quite different from writing scholarly tracts, in which one can ramble from pillar to post at will. In fact, it’s been a whole new educational experience for me. But with the help of Bill and his copy editor, Robbie Steele – who is, by the way, a real gem, – I’m beginning to get the hang of it, though the learning process goes on.