Laudator Temporis Acti

Diogenes Laertius 4.8.60 (on Lacydes; tr. R.D. Hicks):

He studied geometry late, and some one said to him, "Is this a proper time?" To which he replied, "Nay, is it not even yet the proper time?"

ὀψὲ δὲ αὐτῷ γεωμετροῦντι λέγει τις, εἶτα νῦν καιρός; καὶ ὅς· εἶτα μηδὲ νῦν;

Labels: opsimathy

Goethe, Faust, Part II, lines 6637-6641 (tr. David Luke):

As your old mossy pate can yet apprize me,
You're still a student. What else can you do
But just read on! That's scholarship for you!
One builds a modest card-house, there to sit;
Even great minds never quite finish it.

Ich weiß es wohl: bejahrt und noch Student,
Bemooster Herr! Auch ein gelehrter Mann
studiert so fort, weil er nicht anders kann.
So baut man sich ein mäßig Kartenhaus,
der größte Geist baut's doch nicht völlig aus.

The same, tr. Stuart Atkins:

I know the type—the student who keeps on
until he's middle-aged! But even learned men
continue studying because of some compulsion.
That's how a shabby house of cards is often started
which even the best mind cannot complete.

---

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, tr. Margarita Marinova (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2019), pp. 69-70:

B: There were some very old students. There was no limit ... you could keep studying ...

D: That's ridiculous!

B: Yes. If you could pay to keep studying, that's all that mattered.

D: Don't you think that's ridiculous?

B: There were certainly some minuses, but also pluses to the system. There were some old students, who never really attended classes, but wanted some kind of status in life, so they became eternal students. That's what they were called, "eternal students." It was the same situation in Germany, even more so. You were given a general student gradebook, "a matricula card." You could study one subject at one university, another — somewhere else, a third one at a third, and it was all legal.

D: So there was no concept of "university year" — freshman, sophomore, etc. — and moving up each year?

B: There was, there was, but it was a formality. Usually what mattered was how many years you spent studying — three years meant you were a third-year student ...

D: And what if you studied there for eight years? Were you supposed to be an eight-year student?

B: We didn't count beyond the usual years ... "He is a perpetual exam taker ..." or "This student has a tail ...," as we used to say.

D: So there were students with "tails"?

B: Right. For example, someone could study for five or six years, but still have many "tails," that is, exams he hasn't passed. In Germany, you could take exams in any subject at any university you wanted. That was great, because there were different professors at different schools. Everybody wanted to take a course with the most famous, the best professor at the time, so they went ...

D: ... to his particular university.

B: Yes. And moved somewhere else from there. They also had those students, the kind we called "eternal students." But they had a different name for them: "bemooster Herr," that means "hairy face" ...

D: You mean with a beard?

B: No, wait, here is a better translation. "Moos," "Bemooster Herr." Covered in moss! Moss. Yes. That's the best expression, a mossy student, someone covered with moss. We called them "old students" or "eternal students."

Friedrich Strehlke, Wörterbuch zu Goethe's Faust (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1891), p. 15:

bemoost, 6638, bemooster Herr. Das bekannte Studentenlied von G. Schwab: „Bemooster Bursche zieh' ich aus“ ist schon von 1814, also viel älter als der zweite Theil von Faust.

Labels: opsimathy

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 584 (tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

In old men, the qualities of a good learner remain ever young.

αἰεὶ γὰρ ἡβᾷ τοῖς γέρουσιν εὐμαθεῖν.

ἡβᾷ codd.: ἥβη Margoliouth
εὐμαθεῖν Headlam: εὖ μαθεῖν codd.

Eduard Fraenkel ad loc.:

Labels: opsimathy

John Conington (1825-1869), "A Liberal Education," Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. I (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872), pp. 449-478 (at 457-458):

A dead language which is not learnt till the age of sixteen will, I fear, as a general rule, not be learnt at all. There is something in the mastering of grammar and dictionary difficulties which naturally belongs to the earliest stages of instruction, when learning is more or less compulsory. A boy who is conscious of making real progress in one or two languages (I speak from my own school experience) will be the very person to resent most the drudgery of having to carry on, pari passu, the low, childish taskwork of another tongue. And if this is true of any language, it is true of Greek in a very high degree. The mere strangeness of the character has something repellent in it, so that even one who can read Greek pretty fluently (I speak not merely of what I felt as a boy, but of what I feel to this day) will often prefer, in reading an unfamiliar author, to read him with the help of a Latin translation. Then, again, the fact, noticed by Mr. Sidgwick in another connexion, that Greek has influenced modern languages so little, renders it specially difficult, and by consequence specially repulsive. Who that has groaned under the unfamiliarity of the German prefixes an and mit, über and unter, ver and zer, the force of which it requires such an effort to calculate beforehand, can doubt what annoyance a clever boy of sixteen would feel in constantly having to turn to his lexicon to satisfy himself about the effect of ἀνά, κατά, μετά, and παρά in composition?

I.F. Stone (1907-1989), The Trial of Socrates (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), p. xi:

In my day, even in a country high school, one had four years of Latin to prepare for college, and Catullus and Lucretius were among my early enthusiasms. But I had only one semester of Greek in college before I dropped out in my junior year.

I decided in retirement to learn enough Greek to be able to grapple with conceptual terms for myself. I started on my own with a bilingual edition of the Gospel of St. John, then went to the first book of the Iliad. But the study of Greek soon led me far afield into the Greek poets and Greek literature generally. Their exploration continues to be a joy.

From I.F. Stone's interview of himself, New York Times (January 22, 1978):

I well remember that terrible morning in the basement stacks at American University, before I had acquired my office and title, when I discovered that Bishop Thirlwall, the great Whig historian of Greece, had already learned Greek at the age of 4. Luckily, I was not armed, or I would have shot myself there and then beside the shelves of classics. How could I dare, in my late 60's, to begin the long and rocky ascent to the distant peaks of that intricate language at my age?

I.F. Stone, shortly before his death

Labels: opsimathy

Ammianus Marcellinus 28.4.15 (tr. J.C. Rolfe):

Whereas, considering the greatness of their fame and of their parentage, they ought to pore over many and varied works; they ought to learn that Socrates, when condemned to death and thrown into prison, asked a musician, who was skilfully rendering a song of the lyric poet Stesichorus, that he might be taught to do this while there was still time. And when the musician asked of what use that could be to him, since he was to die on the following day, Socrates replied: "In order that I may know something more before I depart from life."

cum multa et varia pro amplitudine gloriarum et generum lectitare deberent, audientes destinatum poenae Socratem, coniectumque in carcerem, rogasse quendam scite lyrici carmen Stesichori modulantem, ut doceretur id agere, dum liceret: interroganteque musico quid ei poterit hoc prodesse morituro postridie, respondisse 'ut aliquid sciens amplius e vita discedam'.

J. den Boeft et al., Philological and Historical Commentary on Ammianus Marcellinus XXVIII (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 196-197:

In Euthd. 272 c Plato says that Socrates as an old man took music lessons with the lyre player Connus. The story is also told by Cic. Sen. 26 and V. Max. 8.7 ext. 8: Socraten etiam constat aetate provectum fidibus tractandis operam dare coepisse satius iudicantem eius artis usum sero quam numquam percipere. In prison Socrates, according to Pl. Phd. 60 d–61 b, occupied himself by writing a hymn to Apollo and putting some fables of Aesop into verse.

As Valesius saw, Amm. made a mistake in telling this story about Socrates. In fact it was Solon, who as a very old man heard a nephew sing a wonderful poem of Sappho and asked the young man to teach him that song. A similar inaccuracy is found in 14.9.6, where Amm. mistakes Zeno of Citium for Zeno of Elea; see Rosen, 1982, 133. In an age without Realencyklopädie or Wikipedia such confusions were inevitable.

[....]

In the words of Aelianus, quoted in Stob. 3.29.58 (ed. Hense): ἐρωτήσαντος δέ τινος διὰ ποίαν αἰτίαν τοῦτο ἐσπούδασεν, ὁ δὲ ἔφη 'ἵνα μαθὼν αὐτὸ ἀποθάνω.' ('and when someone asked him for what reason he was eager to learn this, he answered: "in order to die knowing it"'). Amm. may have had Solon's famous dictum in mind fr. 17 γηράσκω δ' αἰεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος ('I grow old learning many things').

---

Dear Michael,

Your quotation today about Socrates' bothering to learn something new on his last day alive reminds me of this anecdote about Oliver Wendell Holmes (from Britannica online):

A man austerely dedicated to his work, he also enjoyed the earthy and the droll. He loved Rabelais. Sometimes in Washington he attended burlesque shows and was said to have remarked, "I thank God I am a man of low tastes." The newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt called upon the retired justice and found him reading Plato. "Why do you read Plato, Mr. Justice?" "To improve my mind, Mr. President," replied the 92-year-old man.

I have seen several versions of this anecdote: in one he is reading a Greek grammar, in another he reads Plato in Greek.

[....]

Vale,

Kevin [Muse]

Labels: opsimathy

Erasmus, Adages I i 1 to I v 100, translated by Margaret Mann Phillips, annotated by R.A.B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 200-201 (I ii 61):

Senis mutare linguam
To teach an old man a new language

Age is slow at any kind of learning, but especially at learning a language, a faculty which is given by nature to children. It is generally well known that children can learn to speak any tongue, while older people do not achieve it or imitate it very badly. Hence the proverb 'to teach an old man a new language,' applied to those who labor at the wrong time and in vain. St Jerome says in the preface to the four Gospels: 'It is a worthy task, but one of dangerous presumption, to judge others when one is open to be judged by all, and to teach an old man a new language, and turn back a world that is turning grey to its childish beginnings,' by which he means that the adult age is less amenable in all ways than those unformed and tender years, and Ovid puts this in an elegant metaphor:

The tree spreading wide its shade to the walkers beneath it
Once was a wand, when first it was planted in earth.
Then a mere hand's turn could pull it from shallow ground simply,
Now it stands firm, by its own strength grown huge.

For this reason the character must be formed while the age is malleable; the mind accustomed to the best, while it is impressionable as wax. For later on, by the force of years, the mind becomes rigid, and we can hardly unlearn what we have learnt wrong; what we do not know can only be taught us with infinite trouble. I am not saying this to deter older people from learning, since it is never too late to learn, but in order to urge children to study.

We must not leave out the saying, common though it is, 'the old parrot takes no notice of that rod.' Although the meaning of the adage is not obscure, it will become clearer from the words of Apuleius, in the Florida, book 2, about the parrot: 'When being trained to imitate our country speech, it is tapped on the head with an iron key so that it really feels who is master. This takes the place of the cane while it is learning. The young bird learns at once, up to the age of two years, while the mouth is pliable and can be moulded, and the tongue is tender and vibrates quickly. But if an old one is caught, it is both unteachable and forgetful.' Thus far Apuleius. Pliny also mentions, book 10 chapter 42, the wonderful teachableness of the bird, but only up to two years old. Close to these remarks is a common but not inelegant expression: 'it is too late to accustom old dogs to the leash.'

Jerome] Preface to the Vulgate version of the Gospels; PL 29.525 (557).

Ovid] Remedia amoris 85-8.

Apuleius] See I i 15n; Florida 12

Pliny] Naturalis historia 10.119; added in 1517/8.

expression] Tilley D 500 An old dog will learn no new tricks. This was in Collectanea no 311 as a popular saying; see i iv 43n.

In Latin:

Senis mutare linguam

Cum ad omnem disciplinam tardior est senectus tum potissimum ad discendam linguam, quae facultas maxime pueris a natura data est. Quapropter etiam vulgo compertissimum pueros facile quamuis exprimere linguam, contra natu grandiores aut non assequi aut parum feliciter imitari. Inde prouerbium Senis mutare linguam de frustra atque intempestiue laborantibus. Diuus Hieronymus praeloquens in quatuor Euangelia Pius, inquit, labor, sed periculosa praesumptio, iudicare de caeteris ipsum ab omnibus iudicandum, senis mutare linguam et canescentem mundum ad initia retrahere paruulorum. Quo significatur adultam aetatem ad omnia minus esse tractabilem quam rudes illos ac teneros annos, id quod eleganti metaphora dictum est a Nasone:

Quae praebet latas arbor spaciantibus vmbras,
    Quo posita est primum tempore virga fuit.
Tunc poterat manibus summa tellure reuelli,
    Nunc stat in immensum viribus aucta suis.

Quare tunc formandi mores, cum mollis adhuc aetas, tunc optimis assuescendum, cum ad quiduis cereum est ingenium. Nam posteaquam annis iam ceu diriguit animus, et vix dediscimus quae perperam didicimus, et quae nescimus, non sine maximo negocio nobis inculcantur. Neque haec dixerim, vt adultiores a discendo deterream, cum nulla sit aetas ad discendum sera, sed vt pueros ad discendi studium acuam.

Ne hoc quidem praetermittendum, quanquam vulgo iactatum: 'Senex psittacus negligit ferulam'. Adagii sensus tametsi per se non est obscurus, tamen magis liquebit ex Apulei verbis, quae sunt in libro Floridorum secundo de psittaco: Quae rusticum nostrum sermonem cogitur aemulari, ferrea clauicula caput tunditur, imperium magistri vt persentiscat. Haec ferula discenti est. Discit autem statim pullus vsque ad duos aetatis suae annos, dum facile os vti conformetur, cum tenera lingua vti conuibretur. Senex autem captus et indocilis est et obliuiosus. Hactenus Apuleius. Indicat et Plinius libro decimo, capite quadragesimosecundo miram esse docilitatem huic aui, verum non nisi primis duobus vitae annis. His finitimum est quod vulgo quidem, attamen haudquaquam ineleganter dicitur, serum esse canes vetulos loris assuefacere.

Labels: opsimathy

Aristophanes, Clouds 639-640 (Socrates to Strepsiades; tr. Jeffrey Henderson):

Very well then, what would you begin learning now,
of the subjects you were never taught anything about? Tell me.

ἄγε δή, τί βούλει πρῶτα νυνὶ μανθάνειν
ὧν οὐκ ἐδιδάχθης πώποτ' οὐδέν; εἰπέ μοι.

My answer might be chemistry, which I never studied in school. On the other hand, maybe it's too late. Id. 854-855 (Strepsiades speaking):

                    But every lesson I learned
I forgot right away because I'm too old.

                                ἀλλ᾿ ὅ τι μάθοιμ᾿ ἑκάστοτε
ἐπελανθανόμην ἂν εὐθὺς ὑπὸ πλήθους ἐτῶν.

Labels: opsimathy

Erasmus, letter 149 (to Antony of Bergen; March 16?, 1501; tr. Francis Morgan Nichols):

For I have by a lucky chance got some Greek works, which I am stealthily transcribing night and day. It may be asked why I am so pleased with the example of Cato the Censor, as to be learning Greek at my age. I answer, Reverend Father, that if I had had this mind when a boy, or rather if the times had been more favourable to me, I should have been the happiest man in the world. As it is, I am determined that it is better to learn late than to be without the knowledge which it is of the utmost importance to possess. We had a taste of this learning a long time ago, but it was only with the tip of the tongue, as they say; and having lately dipped deeper into it, we see, what we have often read in the most weighty authors, that Latin erudition, however ample, is crippled and imperfect without Greek. We have in Latin at best some small streams and turbid pools, while they have the clearest springs and rivers flowing with gold.

The Latin, from Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P.S. Allen, tom. I: 1484-1514 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906; rpt. 1992), p. 352:

Nam Graeca quaedam forte fortuna sum nactus, in quibus furtim transcribendis et pernox sum et perdius. Roget quis, quid ita me Catonis censorii delectet exemplum vt hoc aetatis libeat Graecari. Si quidem puero mihi, pater optime, aut haec mens fuisset, aut non defuissent potius mihi témpora, longe felicissimus essem. Nunc ita statuo, satius esse vel serius discere quam nescire quae cum primis oportet tenere. Delibauimus et olim has literas, sed summis duntaxat (vti aiunt) labiis; at nuper paulo altius ingressi, videmus id quod saepenumero apud grauissimos autores legimus, Latinam eruditionem, quamuis impendiosam, citra Graecismum mancam esse ac dimidiatam. Apud nos enim riuuli vix quidam sunt et lacunulae lutulentae; apud illos fontes purissimi et flumina aurum voluentia.

Labels: opsimathy

Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 15.30.1 (tr. J.C. Rolfe):

Those who approach the study of letters late in life, after they are worn out and exhausted by some other occupation, particularly if they are garrulous and of only moderate keenness, make themselves exceedingly ridiculous and silly by displaying their would-be knowledge.

qui ab alio genere vitae detriti iam et retorridi ad litterarum disciplinas serius adeunt, si forte idem sunt garruli natura et subargutuli, oppido quam fiunt in litterarum ostentatione inepti et frivoli.

Labels: opsimathy

Alastair Hannay, Introduction to Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. ix:

Although Lowrie's engagement with Kierkegaard had begun earlier in the century, it is staggering to realize that it was not until he had reached the age of sixty-four that he began studying Danish with a view to translation.

Labels: opsimathy

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals (August 31, 1872):

I thought to-day, in these rare seaside woods, that if absolute leisure were offered me, I should run to the college or the scientific school which offered best lectures on Geology, Chemistry, Minerals, Botany, and seek to make the alphabets of those sciences clear to me. How could leisure or labour be better employed? 'Tis never late to learn them, and every secret opened goes to authorize our aesthetics. Cato learned Greek at eighty years, but these are older bibles and oracles than Greek.

Emerson was 69 when he wrote those words.

Labels: opsimathy

Eric Ormsby, Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation (Erin: The Porcupine's Quill, 2001), p. 162 (in "Jorge Luis Borges and the Plural I"):

Polyglot from childhood, fluent in English, French, German and, of course, Spanish, and having taught himself Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse in middle age, Borges finally embarked on the study of Classical Arabic with an Egyptian tutor whom he met in Geneva in the last year of his life. He was then eighty-six.

Labels: opsimathy

I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988; rpt. New York: Anchor Books), p. xi:

In my day, even in a country high school, one had four years of Latin to prepare for college, and Catullus and Lucretius were among my early enthusiasms. But I had only one semester of Greek in college before I dropped out in my junior year.

I decided in retirement to learn enough Greek to be able to grapple with conceptual terms for myself. I started on my own with a bilingual edition of the Gospel of St. John, then went on to the first book of the Iliad. But the study of Greek soon led me far afield into the Greek poets and Greek literature generally. Their exploration continues to be a joy.

Johann Hamza, An Old Man Reading

Labels: opsimathy

R.W. Lamb (1920-2010), at the age of 84, quoted in Ian Jackson, "Raymond William Lamb: Portrait of a Bibliophile XL," The Book Collector 59.4 (Winter 2010):

For some years now I have been re-reading the Latin and Greek classics often in bed straight through with no commentary. It is surprising how satisfying this is. Of course I don't understand everything, but does this matter? Yes, it does if you are studying the book intimately, but if you are reading for pleasure, as books were meant to be read, no.

Thanks very much to Ian Jackson for sending me an offprint of this article, as well as many other offprints, books, pamphlets, and photocopies.

Labels: opsimathy

From an email sent to me by Eric Thomson:

Joan Coromines, the Catalan Romance linguist, was in the habit of working twelve hours a day right up until his death in 1997 at the age of ninety-two. On his bedside table during the final week of his life were 'els Evangelis en grec, dos volums de les Confessions de Sant Agustí en llatí, les obres completes de Dante en italià, els Anys d'aprenentatge de Wilhelm Meister, de Goethe, en alemany i en caràcters gòtics, un volum de les tragèdies d'Euripides en grec, el seu estimat exemplar de La vida austera, de Pere Coromines, i dos volums de la correspondència de Josep Carner'. Sergi Sol, Joan Coromines: Una Vita de Llegenda (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2005) p. 350.

I don't know Catalan (or Spanish, for that matter), but I think that on Coromines' bedside table were "the Gospels in Greek; two volumes of St. Augustine's Confessions in Latin; Dante's complete works in Italian; Goethe's Wilhelm Meister: The Years of Apprenticeship, in German and in Fraktur script; a volume of Euripides' tragedies in Greek; his beloved copy of The Austere Life, by Pere Coromines; and two volumes of Josep Carner's letters."

Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, Old Man with a Book

Labels: opsimathy

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf (tr. Alastair Reid):

At various times I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast encompassing
circle can take in all, accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety and beyond this writing
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

According to an interview with Rita Guibert, reprinted in Richard Burgin, ed., Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, 1998), pp. 44-45, Borges began to study Old English in 1955, i.e. in his mid 50's.

Bernard Ashmole, "Sir John Beazley (1885-1970)," in Donna Kurtz, ed., Beazley and Oxford: Lectures delivered in Wolfston College, Oxford, 28 June 1985 (Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1985), pp. 57-71 (at 70):

When convalescing in his seventies from an attack of pneumonia, he was reading through Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary. He explained that he had never had time systematically before; that his tutor at Balliol had once recommended it, but at the time he had managed only to read through Liddell and Scott. 'It is amazing what one does not know.' Dietrich von Bothmer also recalls finding him working steadily through a Russian dictionary and making a note of every word with which he was not acquainted. His memory often seemed incredible because it was not the mechanical memory of a prodigy, but ruminative - the memory of a humanist. He could quote, and quote with relevance and scholarly accuracy, much of the world's great poetry in many languages, and there was no subject, except perhaps music, which he could not illuminate.

"It is amazing what one does not know" reminds me of the motto of Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655) — "Quantum est quod nescimus" ("How much there is that we don't know").

Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, Old Man with a Book
Thanks to R. Threadgall for the generous gift of Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1999), and to Eric Thomson for the quotation about Beazley.

Related posts:

• Lingomania and Opsimathy
  
• Elementarius Senex
  
• O Seri Studiorum
  
• Opsimathy

Labels: opsimathy