A Day in the Life

Ok, I can stand it no longer: action movies seem even stupider when viewed in an airplane without sound, when you can truly see how melodramatically stupid and redundant they are. I have utterly no idea what particular movie it is, but that doesn’t matter; I’ve already seen it, in various parts in all of the other action movies I’ve seen: the dirty, often bloody, crying girl, shirt tantalizingly torn and drooping, crouching behind the tank/jeep while some guerrilla/alien/droid hunts her down; the ship’s mast exploding into smithereens at the impact of some incendiary device, reminiscent of the attack on the Twin Towers; the frantic swim in fiery waters, the heroes’ faces bloodied bruised as they desperately try to reach floating wreckage. Sound familiar?

Yeah, to me too. So instead of paying the extra money for the in-flight movie, I’ll write a blog post instead.  I believe I left off before talking about the philosophy behind Accademia Vivarium Novum. So let me get into some of the logistics. Here’s an example of a characteristic day:

8:00 am—Breakfast. It’s almost always the same: two types of cereal (one plain and reminiscent of corn flakes, the other a chocolate-y one similar to Cocoa Puffs), yogurt, some very manufactured-tasting croissants coming in plastic wrappers, and the ever-present stash of saltines, packaged toast (who would have thought?), and English-style biscuits (translation: crispy sweet cookies typically served with tea). And some days there was even a sweet bundt cake. Overall, not bad (though some days I sorely missed my staple oatmeal).

It seems every European country has its conventional breakfast foods. In England, it’s tomatoes, beans, eggs, sausage, mushrooms, and eggs. In France, it’s baguette slices with nutella or butter somehow cooked into the form of a croissant. In Italy, evidently, or at least in Rome, it’s the packaged croissants, filled with either a sweet custard or a chocolate cream.

Now, perhaps you can hear (or read) a slight tinge of disdain in the above description. But to be fair, whenever throughout the summer I had cause to raise an eyebrow at a particular food, I later discovered that very same dish in a restaurant or cafe in Rome. So we were eating what was very high quality Roman food. Now, if rice with olives, hard-boiled eggs, tomato slices, mozzarella curds, and peas isn’t your cup of tea, well, that’s your problem. But it is, nevertheless, true Italian food.

The reason I dwell on the breakfast food is not simply because I found it sociologically interesting. But it was also important for another reason: when, knowing absolutely no Latin, you are dropped into a world in which you must eat alongside people speaking only Latin, your food becomes very significant—and very interesting in long silences.

9:00 am—Schola begins. Mug of caffeinated tea at the ready, I was initially amazed at the intergalactic pace of the lessons: two chapters of the textbook a day, all in Latin, coupling both grammar and vocabulary. Yet learn we did, due in no small part to the amazingly talented magistrii. Aloisius, the founder, is aided in this by his own former students, who after a year or two at the academy have better Latin than many university professors. After Aloisius, our primary teacher was Gerardus, a twenty-three-year-old Mexican who not only is an expert in Greek, but has a remarkable talent for drawing on chalkboards and acting out Latin texts. Let me just say, his version of the Rape of the Sabines reduced us all to tears—and not on behalf of the women.

Thankfully, the amount of homework declined after the first month, at which time we were finally able to envision afternoon “free time” that was actually “free.” The second (!) textbook was also composed of authentic Latin texts themselves, some simplified, rather than stories of a particular Roman family composed in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the teaching method remained the same: learning through living. That means not studying grammar charts and vocab lists, but learning them in modo through their incorporation in Latin texts. It’s perhaps a bit difficult for people with an ordered, mathematically wired (for lack of a better description) brain; in fact, the latter is how I tend to learn. But you certainly learn fast the other way! And while, in learning French, my ability to read and speak far outstripped my ability to aurally comprehend, my ability to understand spoken Latin is probably my most developed sense of the language, or perhaps equal to my reading comprehension. So, I guess the method works! We’ll see if I retain anything—and if I can pass Columbia’s exam come fall.

2:00 pm—Lunch. Yes, that’s right, 2 pm, which equals one hungry class discipulorum. But here, as at dinner, we know exactly what to expect. First course: pasta. Invariably. Always pasta. Once in a very infrequent blue moon, perhaps rice. Then a meat dish, with either vegetables on the side or in a third platter.  Warning: in lingua italica, or at least in lingua italica accademiae vivarium novum, potatoes count as a vegetable. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I would be very happy never eating pasta again for the rest of my life. If pesto never crosses my lips again, I think I will be just fine. Now, admittedly, the pasta was good, and varied. Many people I know would rejoice. But when you have it two times a day for two months...