Cervus lux in lucerna.

Sometimes I think I am suffering from insanity.  Maybe it’s dementia?  Whatever it is, in a moment of madness that I fear will haunt me the next ten weeks, I signed up for a Latin class.  It was offered through the same branch of the University of Chicago as the Great Books program I’m just finishing up, so I thought what the hell.  I took two years in high school.  Surely some of that will come back?

Nope.  Nothing.  Nada.  Nihilo.  Other than the vaguely familiar terms such as “dative case” and “ablative case” nothing remains.  And only the terms remain; there’s nothing anywhere in my scrambled brain about what they mean, how they are used, and just what the heck to do with them.

I found that out yesterday in the first class.  I had worked hours--and I’m not exaggerating--to make flash cards for vocabulary and major concepts such as declensions, conjugations, and word order, and I labored over translations trying to get everything exactly right.  I wasn’t even close in some cases, and in others I had the wrong declension or conjugation and had something being done to someone when he or she should have been being done to.  Or something like that.  Two and a half hours of class and I was totally befuddled.  I had misunderstood several key concepts (there’s a “second conjugation”?) and once we started class the vocabulary left for parts unknown.  It was not a good day.

But I’m sticking it out.  I’m going back and rereading the early parts, sorting out all those cases and declensions and whatnot and, in two weeks when I return to class, maybe I’ll have a firmer grasp.  And yes, I have to miss next week’s class (it only meets once a week) for a family wedding (don’t get me started on that!) which is not going to help me with Latin one little bit.

Fortunately, I keep my liquor cabinet stocked.  Oh, and don’t bother going to Google Translate; the title above means “Deer in the headlights,” or, actually, lamplight, since the Romans didn’t have cars.  At least I pretty sure about that.

[Update: I gave the Latin class up.  I had high hopes.  But I just couldn’t manage to retain vocabulary--nor syntax nor inflections nor much of anything else.  Although I drilled (for vocabulary, I made flash cards) over and over, I would find that I couldn’t remember translations of words from chapter 1, even though I was working on chapter 6.  And all the declensions and conjugations never organized themselves in my brain with anything resembling coherence.  I was disappointed, but I did recognize that I was working way too hard for far too little reward.  Even after some much appreciated encouragement from Michaelangelo, the instructor, I just couldn’t justify continuing.  And he’s one of the best teachers in the program, one I’ve had several times in the past; I regretted my failure for fear that he would see it as a failure on his part.  It wasn’t.  I take all the blame for biting off way more than I could mentally chew.  I suppose ancient Greek is out . . .  ]