I’m Only at Peace When I’m in Greek: a Silly Prose

Vivi Kane

   As any first-year student at Saint Anselm College knows, our Canvas dashboard prompts us to choose our foreign language requirement: Modern, such as Spanish, French, or others; or Classic, Latin or Ancient Greek. Being a reasonable, rational psychology major, who at the time had plans to do social work, I chose the most applicable, practical language to learn: Ancient Greek.

   My reasoning for choosing this was even more sound: I already knew some of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, and since that was built from Greek, I hoped learning Greek would help me learn Russian. While with French I would have had muscle memory from my 2 years learning as a homeschooled adolescent, and Spanish would have been immeasurably more versatile in the family services field, there was an allure to ancient Greek. 

I just need a C, I told myself; no grad school is going to look at a psychology student’s transcript and scoff that Ancient Greek is less than an A. Aside from that, how many people can say they took 3 semesters learning from a composed, articulate man who knows (by my count) 8 languages (maybe 6 or 7), including teaching himself Romanian because he’s “stubborn”? 

   Yes, Greek is a labor to decipher and memorize all the voices, tenses, and aspects of a single verb and participle. But all the meaning is there. As someone who feels the need to explain everything in minute detail in order to not be dismissed—a defense mechanism forged from decades of being made silent, talked over, and my desires used against me under the guise of dry humor and sarcasm—Greek allows none of this. Once I’ve massaged the syntactic tensions, there is a precision that I can only appreciate and admire. When you love something, you take the time to learn it. To sweep with every sloping sigma, dive with the swan-like delta, and adore “eso”: sigma, witnessing the burgeoning elopement of epsilon-omicron, humbly bows out, blessing the conjugation to omicron-upsilon (“ou”). By way of paradigm, every adjective, noun, and verb has a home and family to go with it. 

   I have a reputation to uphold. I am a proud behavioral science graduate from Manchester Community College, magna cum laude, and class 

speaker. I’m a single student-mother at a Catholic college. I’m older than all the seniors. Which is why, in my psychology classes, I feel I’ve failed if I don’t speak up, or say something stupid or wrong. I’ve more than a few times only half-joked if I could change my major as a senior.

   I have vomited from anxiety before philosophy class.

   The pressure to perform tightens my throat in a chokehold. In Greek class, I don’t feel this. It is amusing to watch the crinkled brow of confusion when someone asks if I’m a classics major and I say no—because every decision needs a reason, and the logic does not compute on a surface level. Every reason has a why—if you ask, you must commit to listening.

   It’s not a matter of being the highest-achieving student; it’s about proving some people wrong, and other people right. The people who said my life was ruined by keeping my pregnancy? I can’t let them win. The people who are amazed at my progress? I can’t let them down. Least of whom my daughter, Mika. I need her and everyone else, those younger than me and those older, to witness that having a child is not a dead end of brambles. It is a rerouting through vines of verdure.

   Ancient Greek is the one class I wholly chose under no obligation. 

Whatever my ending grade, I know it does not harm my worth as a “non-traditional” student-mother. Greek gives me peace.

   Kyrie eleison.