For the past couple of days I have been entertaining the odd notion that I want to learn Latin. My young nephew has impressed his teachers and so they have sent him off to the state championships. I figure that I'm the only one in the family who might care enough to correspond with him and keep that light burning. But also I am thinking of the crypto fun I might have by employing a basic facility with it. As I keep breaking my fingertips on the bass guitar, I may come to admit after 30 years that I'm just not going to be good enough to play in a roadhouse band, but my language skills are still strong.
And in another way, I find more reasons to be disturbed and cranky with people. This past week gave an interesting combination of impressions on me as I went to San Francisco. I am beginning to see myself, as I know more people who die and disappear every year, closer to old and more alienated from youth. And while I still often entertain paramilitary and doom thoughts at the unraveling of sense in society I'm a lot more likely to become a monk than a horse archer in the coming dark ages.
So I look to Latin as a possible last language of logic, expecting perhaps that the same sort of wonderous diction I find in audiobooks narrated by Simon Prebble might be found somewhere in what remains of the Latin literate.
The prospects appear dim.
The only Latin Meetup groups are all about salsa dancing, and the few local professors I looked up seem hopelessly devoted to useless arcana. Outside of perhaps being able to read what all that Lorem ipsum stuff is, I am coming to believe that Latin is more dead than a little. Alas, my father bequeathed me this disease. O curiosity, you're killing me.
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