A Toast

When I was working as an intern at the Massachusetts Historical Society in 2012, my boss, the preservation librarian, told me about an old saying: “May you live in interesting times.” The story goes that it’s said as a seemingly innocuous toast, but in reality it’s a curse: “Interesting times” are full of turbulence, strife, discord; “interesting times” are the opposite of peace and calm. To be born in “interesting times” is to face a lifetime of apprehension and uncertainty.

I think we can all agree that we are living in “interesting times.”

The past four months it has felt like everything has been piling on. Every time I get a news alert on my phone I have to brace myself for the worst – especially the past few days. At home and abroad, things are so “interesting” that I would give almost anything to return to the mundane. But I have been trying, hard as I might, as spring breaks through the wall of New England winter, to see glimmers of the positive. Through the storms and the turnover of the topsoil, beautiful buds still bloom. Grass can even break through concrete. Ivy can climb up any wall. And me, too – us, too.

When I get a particularly frightening or disheartening news update, or my twitter feed is a barrage of discourse on urgent matters, I occasionally slip into an existential quandary as to whether my chosen field is the best choice for these “interesting times.” How can I defend spending my days studying ancient literature, ancient politics, ancient history? Where does this field of study find its relevance in the modern world? A question I was asked to answer over and over in undergrad was “how do you defend the importance of a liberal arts education?” Going to a liberal arts college, I felt surrounded by a friendly bubble of like-minded people who were constantly offering up tangible answers to this question. But Classical Studies is like the original, and more selective, version of Liberal Arts. It can feel so far removed from where we are now. For many people, I’m sure it is.

But the reality is, there are countless ways that my field of study is relevant. There are urgent questions to be answered in Classical Studies. While I refuse to shut myself off to the present in my pursuit to investigate the past – as tempting as that escape can be – I can also see how learning from the past can enlighten the future. The precious material we have inherited from the ancient world reveals centuries upon centuries of “interesting times.” It reveals centuries of change, transition, turmoil, and turbulence. So that’s the thing about the “curse” – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all live in “interesting times.” We always have. Sometimes some of us get what we want in one place, while others are facing their own bout of turbulence -but the dust never really settles, not for everyone, not all at once.

I know that my PhD in Classical Studies is not likely to win me a Nobel prize or bring me any closer to enlightenment. I know that I am not likely to be the one to save the world or bring us to a sate of peaceful monotony. But I do believe in learning and teaching how to think critically. I do believe that we can learn from the past and better our future. And I do believe that it is vital to take some time to appreciate beauty in this world – and the ancient world has an overwhelming wealth of beauty to provide us, along with its problems and strife.

A few months ago I joined a small local group organized to help one another cooperate in and encourage local activism. If you want change, the best way to try to ensure it is to have a hand in it yourself. I have been more politically active in the past six months than I have for the rest of my 25 years. But it’s hard not to get discouraged when you feel like you’re fighting against an indefatigable current. This won’t ever be over. That can feel daunting. But it has never been over before, and we owe all of the progress we’ve made to the individuals that kept fighting the current.

That said, you can’t fight continuously. At the end of this post I’ve attached a few photos of a zine I made in January to provide some affordable ways to take a break if, like me, you need a lot of downtime between the fight – and some of it needs to be alone.

There is a quote from the ancient poet Hesiod’s Works and Days which says “Badness you can get easily, in quantity; the road is smooth, and it lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it.” It seems impossible that we will ever attain a state of peace. But until then, let us strive for excellence, and let us also strive to see the beauty on the hard road we take there. Let us raise a glass and proclaim: may we live in interesting times, and may we work together to improve them.

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Don’t hesitate to ask.

I do not like to be bad at things.
I suspect this is more or less a universal trait. But it has also always been my natural impulse to give up on anything that doesn’t immediately and easily come to me as a natural skill. It is a stubborn old habit of mine: I want to immediately be the best at something. If that doesn’t appear likely, I instantly lose the drive to keep going.
This has rarely presented itself as an advantage.
In fact, it has made many of my pursuits, from academic to athletic to social settings, immensely difficult at times; it is also a natural quality that I continue to have to fight tooth & nail.
The fight has become slightly easier for two reasons: first, I know the signs of its emergence and have taught myself some techniques to execute a preventive strike before it gains momentum; second, and most importantly, I learned to ask for help.

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Like most stories of this sort, I learned “the hard way.” And I learned the hard way over & over again. Truthfully, I am still learning; I am sure I will continue learning to ask for help for the rest of my life.
There is, however, a period of my life that stands out as the moment I learned how important it is to ask for help; that it is unavoidable; that it is crucial; that it is a strength.

I was 21 and living in Brooklyn with  my cousin and her husband while I participated in an intensive summer-long program to learn ancient Greek. It was essentially an “ancient Greek boot camp,” and I would later come to semi-affectionately describe it as “spending two months in a coma having constant nightmares and waking up to discover that you knew Greek.” I owe the person I am now and the place I’m in and the work I’m doing to this program; however, it was without a doubt the worst summer of my life, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
What’s more, I really wasn’t always sure I could do it.
The program was five days a week for twelve weeks from 9-5, with optional before-school reading groups and lunchtime grammar lessons. Every afternoon we would have a number of exercises to complete, and a whole new set of flashcards to make and memorize. It was A Lot – but, then, we were trying to learn the entire ancient Greek language in 12 weeks.
On our first day in the program our instructors gave us their phone numbers and told us that any of them would be available 24 hours a day to answer questions we had about assignments, and we shouldn’t hesitate to call them, even if it was after midnight.

My first week in the program did not go well. I had never taken an inflected language before, so I didn’t know what declensions were or what purpose they served. Moreover, I severely underestimated the pace of the program. I assumed I would have time later in the week to catch up on concepts we had learned earlier, but every day was a new chapter of grammar and an entirely new set of rules to learn. Before I knew it, I was drowning. I couldn’t catch up, I couldn’t calm myself down to try to move forward, and I felt ashamed. I was calling my parents regularly asking if they thought I should just quit, and voicing my concern over failure.

My rock-bottom moment of the summer came one morning when I slept through my alarm. I had never missed a day of the program. I sort of assumed that if you missed a day – a chapter of grammar – you would essentially be destined to failure and might as well not show up at all. I was stricken with panic and disoriented and crying on the train. I essentially dissolved into anxiety and shame. A stranger on a subway platform touched my arm and told me “whatever it is, it is going to get better. I promise you.” And whoever she was, I am grateful for her. But I showed up to the school still in a state. I ran to the bathroom to hide out and cry some more. Finally, one of the instructors happened to come in. She was an incredibly intimidating person, and I was afraid of her. Seeing her see me in this vulnerable state made me sick to my stomach, until: she grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me into a fierce hug.
“Hey,” she said “calm down. You are going to be fine.” She stared directly at me and said: “You are not failing. Okay? You are going to get through this.”

I pulled myself together.
I went to the head of the program and did something I had heretofore been too ashamed to do: I told him I needed help.

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It is not surprising in retrospect that asking for help meant my work got easier. Admitting that I couldn’t understand certain things on my own by frustratedly re-reading the same paragraphs over and over at 2 AM was a turning point in the program. The head of the program told me things that, at the time, sounded radical to me.
“If you’re still up at 2 AM working on something, get some sleep. You can’t do this without sleep.” and “If you get stuck on a sentence from the homework, mark it as something you want to go over and move on. Don’t dwell on things you don’t understand; try to get as much of your work done as you can understand instead, and then go back to it. You might discover that coming back to it you have found the missing piece.” and “We didn’t tell you to call us any time of day for no reason. You should call for help, whenever you need it.”
But as shocked as I was to hear that I should give myself a break, coming from someone else it was an intense relief. I was burning the candle at both ends, and I was trying to do it on my own; the acknowledgment that this wasn’t sustainable was crucial for my own recognition of what I needed to do – not just to pass the program, but to stay sane.

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I started going in for extra help every morning, and at lunch. I started calling instructors at all hours of the night, and then less so as I started to understand things on my own better. I found a partner to work with after class in the afternoons. I stopped being embarrassed to ask questions in class. And here’s the thing: I passed the course.

I know I’m not the only person who has this same issue with asking for help. I still have to remind myself to ask for help when I need it. I still need practice recognizing when I actually need help. We all want to prove that we can do things on our own – but it’s an incredible strength to admit when you can’t.

More often than not, asking questions and asking for help can help those around you. You can demonstrate that it’s not a weakness to need guidance or assistance with something. You could be asking a question that someone else is too afraid to ask.

As a teacher, I have tried to take my own lessons and help my students learn them in the not-so-hard way. I strive to encourage them to seek me out for extra help studying for exams. I urge them to feel confident and not to be afraid to acknowledge when they don’t understand something. I never want my students to feel afraid to come to me with any issues, and I hope that they don’t. A striking piece of advice from Stephanie McKellop on Twitter (@mckellogs) was to tell your students that asking questions counts for more than making comments towards a student’s participation grade, and I can’t think of a more ingenious system. Being in graduate school is a delicate balance between being a student, being a professional, and being a pedagogue. But the longer I stay in academia, the more I see how similar all of those positions can be. I see professors seeking advice from each other; I see professors treating grad students as colleagues; I see grad students asking one another for help and guidance; I see undergraduates treating grad students as professors and mentors. And I see that everybody struggles with imposter syndrome, and a fear of failure.

We can all always learn to ask for help. Hopefully it doesn’t have to keep being “the hard way.”

You may ask yourself: how did I get here?

“How many of you are taking this course to fulfill the humanities requirement? It’s okay. Be honest.”
At the beginning of a new semester I always ask this question of my students. Almost every student in the room raises their hand. The courses for which I am a Teaching Fellow have been Classical Civilization courses; general examinations of hundreds of years of ancient culture, literature, history. As it fulfills the “humanities requirement,” the majority of the students enrolled in these courses has never taken another humanities course, and has very little experience with the humanities whatsoever. Consequently, both the material and the learning style itself are alien to them. The hands are shy at first; wherefore the “It’s okay. Be honest.”
My next question: “How many of you have already declared your major?”
It is still the majority of my students who – with confidence, this time – have raised their hands.
It is part of my gambit.
I know what I am going to tell them next.

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I started college in the fall of 2010 certain that I was going to be a History major. Further, I was certain that I wanted to study 20th century history, with a focus on WWII. I enrolled in a 20th century history course. It was fascinating and thrilling and everything I knew it would be going into it, and I felt reassured in my predestined decision; in fact, I felt lucky. Those poor undeclared folks out there didn’t have the privilege that I had of passion and certainty in their direction.
Meanwhile, I enrolled in a French course to fulfill the college-wide language requirement and get it out of the way. I had taken French since I was 12 years old, culminating in an adequate performance on an AP exam in high school, and a burgeoning appreciation for New Wave film and Molière. I did not consider French to be a “passion,” but rather an adequately amusing necessity to get through my academic life. On occasion I felt it was a beautiful language. It was not a great concern of mine to keep going.
The French course in which I’d enrolled turned out to be much more challenging than that for which I was prepared. For the first time, my academic essays were written in French on 17th-Century French Literature.
I kept going.
By the end of my sophomore year, I had taken at least one French course per semester. The subject I’d taken to “fulfill a requirement” became my second major.

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My switch to Classical Studies  was perhaps a bit more unpredictable.
It started with an ancient history course. And then a Classical Mythology course, taken just for kicks. And then a Latin class that I dropped halfway through the semester, certain I was stretching myself too thin for the sake of a subject I was unlikely to use for the rest of my academic career.
But my junior year I returned from a semester abroad in Paris to converse with my advisor, a professor who happened to bridge the classics and history departments, about my future.
It came out as a confession:
I think I want to be a classics professor.
This was returned with the simple question:
Are you ready for me to ruin your life?

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I tell my students that as soon as I took my first Classical Mythology course, I knew I was screwed. I tell fellow classicists that it was actually the first time I read about the Gracchi brothers. Whatever the case, an insatiable thirst gnawed away inside of me until, against my better judgment, I surrendered to the simple recognition that I wanted to do this with my life, whatever it took.
In my last year and a half at college, it took:

• One seminar on the Parthenon and a subsequent class trip to Greece
• Enrolling in an introductory course meant for Freshman to fulfill a requirement
• One summer (12 weeks) of intensive Greek at the CUNY SGI which almost killed me (and my poor mother)
• Two semesters of Latin to barely scrape through the major’s requirements
• Two advanced seminars in ancient Greek on the sophists and on Homer’s Odyssey

But I graduated with the double major that I had come to recognize I needed. And still, I wasn’t satisfied. To get to a PhD program, it took a post-baccalaureate year and uprooting a fairly new relationship (twice) and scraping by the GREs.

I don’t tell my students what it took.
I just tell them: “I switched majors halfway through my junior year. You never know what’s going to happen, or which class is going to be the one that changes your mind.”