"Who reads that stuff?"

One night when the beautiful light of the moon
poured into my room ... imagination, taking
something from life: some very scanty thing -
a distant scene, a distant pleasure -
brought a vision all its own of flesh,
a vision all its own to a sensual bed.




It's hard on the Classics scholars, because they are, after all, immersed in a world whose schoolmarm was Plato. This means, for them, when they encounter a passage of awkwardness of translation, its text will not have been policed by hypocrites. It takes a very good school, and very well run at that, to furnish a climate of trust - the body and blood of learning, in any event - where a boy or girl can wander down the hall and ask an honest question. This poem, written in the katharevousa, poses that challenge.


The catastrophe is self-evident where the boy may not inquire, in that setting of zombie piety that will be left of a culture gone not merely mad with denial, but stupid by choice. Parents who know better have been willing to raise dumb children - did I say that, clearly enough? - in a society where speculation is more urgent than conservation. Look at the debris of Brooke Astor's portfolio, if you doubt it.


I write from a polity horsewhipt into innumerable wars and horrendous fiscal follies, on the strength of arguments a 9th grade Classics student would denounce as Sophistry. It's what the whole, bitterly comic interview with the priests was about, in Henry V's deliberately unjust war - the scene Olivier's revolting revamp had to cut. Day after day after day, we still endure that masterpiece of passive-aggressive denial, the Manichaean heresy - the binomial false alternative - by crescendoes from our public rostrums and from Mr Murdoch's media. 

Who cares? 
Who knows? 
There is our ballot box.

It follows: the study of the Classics is an indispensable channel for caring about one's country. 




First, let's see the boy. 
That's a start. 
Now, let's try saying this: I honestly don't intend for this boy to be stupid.


You understand the risk, of course. We won't elect a Governor of Virginia who tells us the misogynistic, homophobic thesis he wrote to get a degree at a seaside sectarian hate-tank is something he never meant to say.








Constantine Cavafy
Birth of a Poem, 1922
Daniel Mendelsohn, translation
C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems,
  The First English Translation
Knopf, 2009©


Daniel Mendelsohn
Commencement Address, 2009


Tassos Paschalis
Moments to remember
Image suite, 30 Dec 10


The Washington Post
29 Aug 09