Qvam Pinus, Father

No. That’s not what you think it means, if you think it means anything at all. And this otherwise adolescent recollection has a serious point, especially with the way political life in the United States is evolving. I suppose I’m going to come across as a complete reactionary, but it’s not as if I care any longer. I am in the process of accepting my fate.

You must remember that the events I am recounting stretch back to the Dark Ages, AD (ok, CE if you feel better) 1967 or so. They involve the sensibilities and humor of adolescent males at an exclusively male Catholic school. In case you haven’t guessed, sensibilities change. While I still find some of this deeply amusing, you had to be there, I suppose. And the point I want to make is, again, serious. You may disagree. That is your privilege.

I had started one of these “bare, ruined choirs” things, but dropped it. I figures no one really cares what happened to the Church I grew up in unless they are at least 70, and maybe 80. And even then, I don’t know many who actually care. So instead I will simply say that love of the Latin language, amor linguae latinae, has been one of the apparent casualties. Oh, yeah. There are some schools where it is still taught–I insisted my son study Latin in high school, which I am sure did a great deal for male bonding, especially when some of his friends insisted on telling him it was “a dead language.” That is not only facile, but incorrect, as any educated person knows. The common figure is that 60 percent of words in English are derived from a Latin root by borrowing, if not direct descent. Which explains why we tended to crush the English SATs back then in a way that the publics (US version) did not. Their loss. And that is trivial. But education is in a bad way in USAmerica, so to Hell with it.

I would have studied Latin no matter where I went to high school, cause my Mother wasn’t about to see me run wild with the heathen (not to mention heathen women) at Lower Merion HS. So it was Catholic one way or another. And in those days, that pretty much meant Latin. The only questions I think was how much and at what level.

Now may Dad, God rest his soul, graduated from West Catholic High School in Philly in 1937. That was no some fancy ass place, and he had his Latin war stories for me. His favorite was “E et noli reddire.” This was to put me in my place when failing to translate “Go and do not return” satisfactorily, as he once did. Yes, imperatives, negative imperative, weird irregular verb form, all that stuff. I’m sure he never said that to anyone flying a B-17 in 1941, but it was what it was. I remembered how obnoxious quoting Latin could be when Robert Oppenheimer apparently said to Lewis Strauss before his security clearance hearing, “Nos morituri te salutamus.” which Strauss supposedly didn’t understand. Supposedly the Roman gladiators addressed the Emperor (really, te?) before the fun and games in the Colosseum (artist’s conception, below) If you haven’t read the transcript of the security committee or seen the Sam Waterstone TV series (I haven’t bothered with the recent movie) you’ll have to look it up. Heh. Maybe it’s apocryphal (more Latin). Anyway, Strauss didn’t much like Oppie, and this, if it happened, didn’t improve things.

Latin was the lingua franca of the Pre-Vatican II Council (1962-1965) church and even if you spoke it badly, you were expected to get by on formal occasions. I heard amusing stories about whitebread Philly types getting around in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s by using some Latin with a priest (Habes-ne uxorem? Olim, sed non nunc: roughly, “Are you married. Not any more.”), and I know until quite recently you could still go to Rome and study Latin with an American priest in “boot camp” form (he has since passed on). There is still a Pontifical Academy for Latin (https://www.pontificiaacademialatinitatis.org/) although, hah, hah, its text is in Tuscan (Italian). But in those days, even as the Roman Catholic Church was losing its Roman Imperial soul, you could still expect to do Latin in a Catholic high school. I knew people who did it in college at Villanova, but I opted for Castillian (Spanish) as, perhaps, a shade more practical. Or, as we said, “relevant.” As an Anglo doing Mexican history, “cultural appropriation” is now more fashionable than “relevance.”

So, here we were, fourteen years old for the most part, and beginning our journey in Latin with the Piarist Fathers at Devon Prep. I doubt any of them were trained classicists and we never got the reconstituted Classical Pronunciation. It was, well, ecclesiastical pronunciation, of which which I thought Keewees Romanus Sum (Civis Romanus Sum) was some sort of put on. So, for the real toffs (I didn’t know any Harrovians then, thank God), we weren’t for real. And, to an extent, our first two years were sort of watered down. Oh, we learned the basic grammar and all that, which was quite enough, cause Latin is, like modern German, an inflected language–the form of the word would change with case, number, gender, that sort of thing. And of course the damned adjectives had to agree, so the possibilities for screwing up even basic stuff were numerous. My first sentence: “Livia puella est.” Followed by (I think) “Livia pulchra est.” Ok: Livia is a girl. Livia is a pretty girl. Hey man, it was 1965. What do you expect? This was an all boys’ school and the priests figured they had to hook us one way or another. The life and adventures (chaste) of pulchritidinous Livia beat talking about Roman plumbing. Cause we all were immediately trying to figure out how to hit on Livia. In Latin. Use your imagination and pretend you are a fourteen year old guy. And so it went. Until Year III.

You didn’t have to go on after Second Year, but I think maybe between 5 and 10 of us did. And all of a sudden, Livia the Hot was gone. In her place was some guy named Cicero and another one inauspiciously dubbed Cataline. Very bad news. We had gotten watered down Caesar in our Second year (“Gallia omnia divisa est in partes tres?), but not in the original. All of that suddenly changed.

My first two Latin teachers were Piarist fathers nicknamed Stubby and Dizzy. The nicknames were quite appropriate, Stubby was a Polish priest with an unpronounceable name (to us) who was short, squat, and gentle. I never saw him get angry–and it wasn’t as if he had no provocation from us. I think it was because all of us realized–even the idiots–that he was something special and endearing. His name was Fr Soczowka, Sch. P. He was followed directly Second Year by Dizzy. Stubby, then Dizzy.

Diz, of course, was another matter. He came by his moniker honestly.

He seemed distracted, addled, occasionally made no sense when he spoke, and was kind of crazy. By name, Fr Julius Olszewski, Sch. P. he was generally placid enough other than for his enigmatic sayings (“Make round on 29”–I have no idea) and occasional eruptions when we were screwing around (always) (“I will give you such a kick that your head will turn around and you will never suppose”). He also took great exception to being called Dizzy, which is understandable. We did get as far as De Bello Gallico, at least a watered-down version. It proved useful in providing names of various barbarian tribes into which we divided as teams playing pick-up basketball (I never got beyond the Suevi, who stunk), so there was that. Also, iacta alea est and crossing the Rubicon and, well, that kind of literary thing. No one got hurt and we learned ablative absolute and subjunctive verb forms Besides, we were reading both volumes of Brinton, Christopher and Wolff in two years of Western Civ, so we had some idea of what was going on. Two years. Literally Plato to NATO. I’m still working off some of that from half a century ago. No regrets, by the way. In any event, there was once a jock strap war in his class. Yup. I’ll leave it to your imagination.

In Latin III, the fun came to a halt, for a while at least. First, we got a stone serious teacher. His name was Stanislaus Swiatek, Sch.P. He didn’t screw around. He was genial enough, but nobody messed with him. He was, colloquially, Stan, although no one dared call him that to his face. He was wiry, medium height, curly hair but balding, fingers stained by nicotine, and a raspy smoker’s voice to accompany it. He radiated “no bullshit”, and lots of stories circulated about his exploits in 1956 when he may have eaten a few Russians alive in Hungary. I could–and can–see it. He was a tough central European customer down to the soles of his feet. And then came Cicero and Cataline.

We got a serious text, none of this schola bona est crap. Uh uh.

“Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?”

A colloquial modern informal translation of this might be: “Dude. Cataline. How long do you plan to torque us around?” That’s not strictly accurate, of course. “How long will you abuse our patience, Cataline. How long will this madness of yours continue to make fools of us? And to what end will your unbridled arrogance be on display?” That’s a little better, probably not for purists, but you get the idea. Cicero (106-43 BCE), a famous Roman statesman, consul, and source of adolescent nightmares second only to Calculus, was here denouncing his rival, Cataline, whom Cicero claimed was part of a plot to overthrow him as consul. And Cicero (Kickero to the toffs) saw Cataline off, as in put to death. I think that appealed to Stan, cause he grinned wickedly when he worked through the speech with us. And he emphasized (I realized in retrospect), that Cicero was going for the kill by insisting that “nos eludet” should be rendered as “make sport of us”. For a guy whose native language wasn’t English like Stan, that was something, because the root of the Latin verb “eludere” was “ludus” or game. So if you wanted to be coarse about it, there was a sense in which Cicero was accusing Cataline of “screwing around” with a central Roman institution of governance–disrespectfully–, you know, playing cat and mouse with the Roman Senate. I remember venturing (as if it were yesterday) that “mock” would be a better choice. Stan wasn’t having it. “Salvucci. He is brigand (yeah, Stan used that kind of vocabulary and diction).” As if to say, “Kid, you may may mock me, but Cataline was toying with someone well above him. He had it coming.”

See, what you got, even as a dense kid, was some idea of the power of language to shape reality. In a way, to create reality. While your Mother may have crassly seen Latin as a means to a 730 in the English SAT (yeah, our class had an 800, but it DC, not me) you were getting a far more subtle lesson. And, yeah, the idea that a traitor was going to be held responsible for his actions–big time–rubbed off too. You may not have gotten all the details, but slowly, there was an accretion of the notion of responsibility, especially public responsibility. You know: “Salus populii suprema est lex.” The Highest Law is the Good of the People. Oh, yeah. Lessons from a dead language. You think Trump or his henchpeople (there, better?) ever learned them? I doubt it. And then there was subjunctive mood (now largely lost to English), tense sequence, periphrastic, deponent and, mirabile dictu, other horrors. And don’t tell me this stuff didn’t stick. It did. It has

Oh man, you are too serious, as one of my less beloved classmates informed me a few years ago. Yeah, well, that’s life. Some are. And some aren’t. But if you think all it was was Sallust, Livy, Nepos, and Pliny the Elder (and, on my own, with assistance from the Assistant Head, Fr Magyar, or “Wheels” as he was fondly known, for part of senior year, Tacitus, Germania, guess again. This was high school and we were, well, never lost for creative ways of messing around. You had to let off steam somehow, because in those days, it was all steam. A different world, believe me. Everything was punishable by expulsion. And our Head, an austere Hungarian we called “Nose” (guess why), didn’t mess around. And we knew it.

Well, Stan was not in the best of health (he died from heart problems in 1971), and at some point in the year, he was replaced by Father Kalman Miskolczy, Sch.P., a tall, lean, red haired guy with a distinct bump on his forhead which produced the cruel but universally held (even among the lay faculty) nickname, “Ripple.” (Dizzy got similar deference: the then current pop-song saw to that.) There was also a cheap sparkling wine of that name in those days, so I guess that helped, although most of us looked for beer. Oh boy. Ripple was something else, and he was comic relief (inadvertant) to Stan’s intensity.

********

Some of this is hard to explain, and we certainly didn’t sound very serious. But you try reading Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis. If I’m not mistaken, Pliny the Elder met his end investigating the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 73 AD, so he is regarded as a serious classical scholar. The work is one of the largest surviving extant classical texts. In a way, it was a bit odd. Pliny the Younger (his nephew) actually provided extrabiblical evidence for the existence of Christians (and historical existence of Jesus Christ) in his Epistulae (as did Tacitus, Suetonius, and quite a few others) , but I guess the textbook got his uncle, the Elder and the natural history, and so did we. On very rough inspection–now years removed–it looks a little easier to construe than some of the stuff we were doing. But, I mean, having teenage boys reading long passages on Roman flora and fauna, or, for God’s sake, clouds, was almost certain to result in wandering minds. Wandering minds, then, led to mischief. And mischief, with Ripple, usually led to catastrophe.

“Pinaster nihil est aliud quam pinus silvestris minor altitudine et a medio ramosa, sicut pinus in vertice. Copiosiorem dat haec resinam quo dicemus modo. Gignitur et in planis. easdem arbores alio nomine esse per oram Italiae quas tibulos vocant, plerique arbitrantur, sed graciles succinctioresque et enodes liburnicarum ad usus, paene sine resina.”

Ok, I thought I’d take an honest pass at this without looking at a translation to figure out why this particularly passage set off the wildest convulsion (there were several) in Latin III under Ripple. I’m not going to do this literally, but basically, it is a description of a type of pine tree. Y’all remember, The Pines of Rome, and justly celebrated they are. Older Philadelphians may remember that Respighi’s theme was the sign-off music that WFIL-TV used in the 1950s back in Philly, back when television was “a vast wasteland,” unlike now, unending font of cultural metaphors it has become. But that obviously wasn’t what flipped us.

“Pinaster is nothing other than a variety of wild pine, somewhat less bushy than usual in the middle than at the tip top. Let us say, it gives off a copious resin.”

Oh, oh. I’d say use your imagination, but since you’re well beyond juvenile sniggering, I guess I better help out, because I am not well beyond juvenile sniggering. “Pinus”, of course, bears a deadly homonymic resemblance to the English word “penis.” (NOT in Latin, of course). And if you want to start a riot in an all male Catholic school of the 1960s you might think of a discussion of the penis led by a sort of out-of-it-Hungarian who was a figure of fun anyway. Add to that “bushy” (Oh my God) followed by, do you believe it, “copious resin.” Surely, you don’t require any more assistance? Oh man, we were, and I remember this vividly, off to the races.

I can still hear the voice of one of my classmates (initials RH) shouting out, “Aw, father, quam pinus.” And Ripple smilingly obliging with “Yes, qvam pinus!” Followed by another, shouted somewhat more brazen (initials JS), “Hey, Father, heh heh, are you quam pinus?” “Yes, Yes, qvam pinus!” Followed by an explosion of laughter, grinning and shouting of “quam pinus?) directed at each other, inevitably followed by–you knew this was coming–“copious resin.” I do think Ripple lost control of us for at least ten minutes, as we accused each other of being “quam pinus” “sine resina”. You had to be there, believe me. This was a class which ended up with several National Merit Scholars of various degrees, all of whom were dissolved in laughter, with poor bewildered, befuddled Ripple trying to figure out what the Hell was so funny. And finally losing it too, realizing something was going on , and he had to put a stop to it. “Quam Pinus, Father!” Yup. Devon Preparatory School. Pietas et Litteras. Anno Domini 1967. Laudetur Iesus Christus.

It’s a shame, really. At that point, at least some of us could pretty much read medieval Latin texts on sight. You know, descriptions of kids skating, festivals, which was nothing in comparison to what we had been basically compelled to do. We might have been able, but we were silly kids and did silly kid stuff. I didn’t know–how could I–that there was a huge body of Latin literature–mostly of a religious nature, such as sermons from the Spanish Empire in later centuries, that nobody, to my knowledge, had really worked through for any reason. Then.

But wait, let it never be said that while on I was on right track, I followed the wrong train. Or maybe that’s just what my career about. Check this brand new volume out. OUP, no less. Like Marlon Brando, I followed the Econ, my Rod Steiger, a one way train to Palookaville. Had I followed Stan, I could have been a contender. Congratulations Professor Laird. You wrote the book I should have written, not something about debt, woolens, or–God forbid–the importance of factor endowments in Mexican economic history.

Quam pinus, Salvucci. Better, as they said on the walls of Pompeii, Magister spado es.