06 VIII 2003 - 20:44 - duo urbes/duo poleis

quickly prefaced:
Today is International Peace Day, and the 58th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Somehow, I fear returning to school, not least because I seem to have forgotten much of my Latin and will have to get it back while keeping up my Greek. And at the same time lines from last year and before, though never complete, run still through my head:

Odi profanum vulgus et arceo:
favete linguis...

I detest the profane throng and I shun them;
keep a reverend silence (lit. 'show favor with [your] tongues').
(Horace, Odes 3.1.1-2)

I realized today that with two weeks left of the summer, I really haven't seen most of the city, haven't done most of the things people told me to do. This was brought home to me when my cousin's aunt and uncle, visiting from Los Angeles and taking their son (one month older than I) on visits to Northeastern colleges, asked me if I'd been to any Broadway shows during my time here, or to many galleries.

The answer, of course, was 'No, I haven't.' With the exception of the weekends where I went out with visitors (the Cloisters, the Met, St. John the Divine, and a hellish afternoon of shopping, that last thanks to the visit of a friend of mine from elementary school), I haven't been out. Most of my weekends are spent in sleeping or studying, and now that the summer's almost over and I have to go back to school, I have to wonder where all the time went.

It's not that I've been idle this entire time. I've learnt a passable amount of Greek -- enough to get me through sections of Euripedes' Medea and Homer's Odyssey, the main deficiencies coming in vocabulary and unfamiliar dialect variants. Indeed, I've enjoyed my summer. On the other hand, New York City has been this removable backdrop to the summer, something I might just as easily replace with a great black hole. It wasn't until I thought about how little I've done outside of the program that I realized how much Greek has consumed my life, how abnormal it is for me to wake up every morning with principal parts on my breath and go to bed after doing exercises on verb conjugation, to go back and forth between studio and classroom (which is air-conditioned to arctic temperatures for some inexplicable reason) without any real thought for what surrounds me.

And when I think I hate New York, I think what I really mean is that I hate Midtown, with the tall buildings and lack of sky and canyons of glass and steel and concrete that, true, one can find in San Francisco, too -- but not to the same height, and through such a large portion of the city. I also mean the bizarre way in which the subway stations are always boiling, no matter how cool it is on the surface, and how it is impossible to get away from the crowds of people in which I have never felt comfortable. It's not as if San Francisco is any more green than New York is, but it is more compact, the streets often more deserted, and I think that's what makes it feel much more accessible to me.

Also, I live there and was born there, and so it's home. I'm not forgetting that.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I don't know whether to dread or to welcome my fast-approaching departure. Best for now to concentrate on what lies ahead: the pleasure of the texts, and those moments with fast friends.