Sunday, February 09, 2014
About 3,000 Pages
Michael Dirda, "Lane Cooper's lessons," The New Criterion (February 2014):
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Lane Cooper grew up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where his father taught Greek at Rutgers. Back in the nineteenth century when Jacob Cooper applied to Yale, he was naturally asked how much Greek he knew. The poor farm boy from southern Ohio replied, "About 3,000 pages." The admissions officer answered, "You mean 3,000 lines." No, Jacob Cooper meant 3,000 pages—he had read virtually the entire corpus of Greek literature on his own while, as his proud son later said, "wrenching a livelihood for his mother out of a reluctant hilly farm."See Lane Cooper, Evolution and Repentance: Mixed Essays and Addresses on Aristotle, Plato, and Dante, with Papers on Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935), pp. 55-56.
