a letter from home

Hey, i got news for you: greek is tough. it's not you. it's greek. as i always tell my students: the good thing about greek being tough is that you never have to worry about looking stupid. greek will make everyone look stupid, eventually. the thing i hated most about Berkeley is that everybody there--the professors as well as the graduate students--couldn't seem to admit how difficult greek is. you know, i finally started grasping that their difficulties with language (which they couldn't see) by seeing their limitations emerge over time. (or, maybe i became more perceptive at seeing their insecurities as i became more adept as a student.) here's the deal: if you are spending all your time just trying to master forms, and irregularities of the language, and esoteric vocab, you're doing it just to hide your insecurities, and what you aren't doing is addressing the grander issues of just how cool Greek literature is. so never let the pimply-faced morphologists get you down when they make you feel insecure about the nuts and bolts. simply take my word that they'll never have any insights whatsoever (that haven't been spoon fed to them by other pimply-faced philologists) into what makes the world of greece so worth studying. never loose sight of the fact that you are learning greek to get to the greeks who wrote it. and that's worth it.