Chapter 15: Physics, Math and Greek

My first class on my first day of class was Physics for Physics Majors, in an amphitheater in a round building in the middle of something called the Math and Science Center. It had been some architect’s attempt to update what a sedate red-brick liberal arts college might want to look like thrust unwillingly into the design notions of the 1960s, but already by the middle of the 1970s it looked exceptionally stupid. For reasons I didn’t understand then and still don’t, architects changed their minds about what all buildings should look like in 1960, and despite the fact that no non-architect agreed with any of the the architects, everything built since the early sixties looks a lot like the Math and Science Center. Sterile and boxy. The exception is single-family residences, and the reason for that is that no one will pay for this junk with his or her own money. Since nobody likes modern architecture, the logical question is: Why? Why do people pay for this crap? Why not design and build something people actually like?

Physics was a 9:00 a.m. class. You walked in from this enormous bricked courtyard to this small circular building with linoleum flooring in a circular hall that led to one of two doors to an amphitheater-style classroom, which was sort of circular. The rows of seats were steeply banked, so that when you sat, if you turned to look behind you, you were looking at someone’s knees. I got there about ten minutes before class was supposed to begin and took a seat near the center at the back, pretty high up. I had nothing to do, so opened my textbook. The preface was about the author’s wonderful colleagues, and the introduction was about the awesome splendor that is Science, so I skipped to Chapter I. It was about vectors. It seemed pretty straightforward. Somebody sat down to my right. After a minute I looked up.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m Toni.” She extended her hand, and I shook it. “You a sophomore, too?” she asked. She had a Memphis/Delta accent. Trim but tall, jeans and a puffy-sleeved shirt in what may have been seafoam green satin.

“Pleased to meet you, Toni,” I said. “I’m Henry. And no, I’m a freshman.”

“Really?” she asked. “You look so mature. Far out! And it’s really, really weird that they let you in here, because I tried to sign up for it last semester and they wouldn’t let me. Said it was too demanding.” She had shoulder-length brown hair, which she flipped behind her right ear. It didn’t catch, so she did it again. She was looking at me, expecting an answer.

“I took a couple of years off between high school and college,” I said, “so I’m a little older than most freshmen.”

“So why do you think they’d let a freshman male take a course that they wouldn’t approve for a freshman female?” asked.

An almost-tall and lanky young man in dark blue corduroy Levi’s and a denim jacket sat down to my right. He had a lot of curly dark-brown hair and hadn’t shaved for two weeks. He was wearing desert boots, an eccentric choice even in 1974. “Hey, Toni,” he said, without acknowledging me. He was carrying a notebook and a textbook. He placed the textbook neatly under his seat, then wrote the day’s date on the top line of the first page of his notebook with a fine-point Bic pen.

“Hey, Rob,” she said, without looking at him. “So are you some kind of physics genius or something?” Toni asked me.

“No, really,” I said. “I’m a double major in Physics and Math, but I never took a Physics course before.”

“What?” both Toni and Rob said. Rob noticed me now.

“I’m a freshman. I haven’t taken any English courses, either.”

“But in high school?” Toni asked.

“No, no. I took General Science and Chemistry. Biology, too. There was a Physics, course, but it wasn’t required for graduation, so I didn’t take it.”

Both of them glared first at each other, then at something else: Toni glared at the toes of her right foot. She’d crossed her legs and was bouncing her right foot in an agitated manner, and she seemed to be staring at the toe of her shoe as she did so. Rob propped his head in his hand and stared, apparently, at the date he’d written at the top of his notebook sheet. I left them to it and continued reading the textbook. It was about vectors. Interesting, but simple.

Almost exactly on time, the professor walked in. He was young-ish, with light brown shoulder-length hair pulled behind his ears and a slightly bushy but not long beard of the exact same color. He was wearing blue wide-wale corduroy jeans, an off-white cable-knit fisherman’s sweater with an enormous turtleneck that looked hot, and desert boots. My second pair of desert boots in as many minutes. What this a Physics thing? The professor was neither tall nor short, and despite perfectly erect posture, unusual on any campus in 1974, he had a casual, fluid way of moving. I looked around. All of the women in the classroom—maybe a third of those present—were watching him with rapt attention, but none of the men had noticed him at all. He took his place behind the large lab-style table that served for a lectern and desk at the front of the amphitheater, opened his textbook to a particular page, put a yellow pad of paper with some notes to his left, then looked over his shoulders at the blackboards behind him, perhaps to verify that they were blank. I was trying to decide how old he was. Twenty-four? Thirty-five? Couldn’t say. He looked at the textbook page and rubbed his hands together as though washing them, then stood up straight.

“Good morning, I’m Lorne Dannhausen,” he said, conversationally. The room immediately became quiet. “This class is Physics 108. Physics for Physics Majors.” His voice was not exactly quiet, but he was making no effort to project. Still, you could hear every word, even as far back in the classroom as I was, and it was a big room, because everyone was listening carefully. “The first thing I want you to know about this class,” he said, “is that we mean it just as we title it. This class is for Physics majors. We expect to challenge those students who are entering our discipline. If you’re looking for a course to fulfill your major’s natural science requirement or a core course requirement because this time fit your schedule, you might want to look at another course. Here, we will explore Newtonian dynamics and its limitations to an extremely thorough degree, and will touch on elements of Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics that will prepare Physics majors for upper-level courses but are not necessary for practitioners of other disciplines. Does anyone have any questions at this point?” He looked around. No one raised his or her hand.

“Next, he continued, I am going to assume a certain degree of mathematical competence that you may not have if you have not completed a course like Mathematics 104, the introductory Calculus course that the Math department here offers. Is there anyone here who has not taken such a course at the college level?” Three or four of us raised our hands. He looked at me. “The mathematics in this course is very difficult, and I will not slow down. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered.

“No need to call me ‘sir,’” he said. “You’re sure you belong here? A bad grade in your sophomore year can adversely affect your future.”

“Yes, sir. I’m a freshman who had a really good high school math experience.”

He smiled, but everyone who was looking at me had a “you don’t belong here you turkey ” expression. “The same goes for the rest of you who raised your hands,” he said. “This is a course for people familiar with calculus. I am not going to slow the pace of the class to teach elementary Calculus to you. You need to know that going in. If you don’t, this may not be the right course for you. Also, the basic concepts of physics need to be familiar to you. Is there anyone here who hasn’t taken either the introductory physics course here at this college or a good high school physics class?” I thought about keeping my hand down, but decided to be honest and raised my hand. Mine was the only hand in the air. He looked at me with a slightly worried expression. “Perhaps you should come talk to me at the end of class,” he said. After warning us for about fifteen more minutes how hard his course was going to be, and how nobody that didn’t want to live inside a particle accelerator belonged in his class, he said we could go.

I was in a middle seat, so it shouldn’t have been hard to wait until the tide of exiting students left to gain access to the aisle and so go speak with Prof. Dannhausen, as he’d requested, but it turned out to be not so easy. Toni to my left and Rob to my right both stood and each of them expected me to leave one way or the other. They both stood and looked at me, neither happy.

“I’m just waiting on everyone to leave,” I said. “I need to speak to Prof. Dannhausen.”

“Dr. Dannhausen,” said Toni. “And we want to leave, too, so you need to go.”

“But I can’t” I said. “You guys are on either side of me.”

“Look, loser, you need to pick right or left, then you need to go. I’m not interested in any more of your undereducated phallocentric bullshit,” said Toni.

“So you want me to leave, right or left, and then you’ll both leave the same way?” I asked, slightly puzzled. All of the rest of the students were long gone, and Prof. Dannhausen was watching us patiently.

“Yes!” said Toni, irritably, as though talking to a five year old to whom she’d explained this point fifteen times.

“Okay.” I picked up my books and turned towards Rob. He pivoted and walked straight out. Behind me Anna sighed an exasperated sigh. “Really. Men!” she said to herself.

Rob and Toni turned right and went upstairs to leave the amphitheater together and I turned left to go downstairs where Prof. Dannhausen was waiting next to the lab table-shaped lectern.

“I see you made friends with Toni and Rob,” he said.

“You know them?” I asked.

“Yes. Since they’re students I shouldn’t comment on them, but I know them. How did you find your interaction with them?” he asked.

“Eccentric,” I said.

“I think they are pretty focused on each other,” he said. He thought about it a second. “Well, he’s focused on her, anyway. But let’s talk about Physics.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ohay. I will support whatever decision you make, but this has the reputation of being a very difficult class,” he said.

“I understand,” I said. “I can do the work.”

“Everybody else in the class has had a year of high school physics and some college physics. They’re all Physics majors. One might assume they’re better prepared for this course than are you,” he said, then immediately thought he might have gone too far. “I don’t mean to malign your intellect or abilities, but part of what goes into a college education, unavoidably, is preparation. It is possible that many of the students in this class have a degree of preparation that will help them succeed here. You can catch up by taking a few introductory courses. But like I said, I will support whatever decision you make.”

“Professor, I appreciate your interest and your concern. I think I will be able to do the work.”

“Okay,” he said. “The first problems we’ll be addressing have to do with constant acceleration and vectors. Do you know what a vector is?”

“A vector is a mathematical quantity with a magnitude and a direction.” He looked at me funny. He may have been surprised at the simple directness of my answer, I don’t know. I was quoting his textbook.

“Okay,” he said, hesitantly.

“Look, I know I went to City High and don’t have much of a Physics background, but I looked through the first chapter and I don’t have any trouble with kinematics in scalar forms, which is what your getting at, or with several vectors operating at once,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, hesitantly, and thought. “Do you have an analogue for your ability to understand this stuff?’

“Analogue?” I asked.

“I guess I mean explanation,” he said.

“I’m a professional pool player, so the idea of forces acting on masses at an angle comes pretty natural to me,” I said. He nodded. “But mainly, in the time I had before class I looked through the first chapter of your textbook and I really didn’t have any trouble following it.”

He nodded. “Still, you don’t have much background. We’re going to cover all of mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and optics. We’re going to discuss it in the context of Newton, Einstein, and quantum mechanics. It’s a tough course.”

“Yes, sir. I think I can do the work.”

“Having talked to you, I’m sure you can do the work,” he said. “Just do it. Don’t fall behind. Don’t get so busy chasing pretty girls or beer that you don’t do your homework.”

“No risk of that, sir,” I said.

“Really?” he asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said.

“You didn’t notice Toni?” he asked.

“The girl sitting next to me in class?”

“Yes. You didn’t notice that she’s extraordinarily pretty?” he asked.

“Yeah, well, I guess I didn’t notice.”

“So, if I ask you to calculate how far an object traveled if it started with an initial velocity of five meters per second and constant acceleration to 15 meters per second, how would you calculate it?” he asked.

“I’d have to think,” I said. He didn’t like that answer.

“What would you think about?” he asked, crossing his arms. He was still holding a chalk, and he deftly held it between two fingers, like a cigarette, so that it didn’t put a mark on his jacket.

“Well, just looking through the problems, it looked like you could restate all of the linear acceleration problems in terms of four or five equations based on what’s missing,” I said.

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“Well, I always liked word problems in math, and it seems like to me it would be more efficient to state all these acceleration problems in terms of what’s missing.”

“Explain,” he said. I had his attention now, but I didn’t understand why. I was just stalling for time on a homework problem.

“Okay, well the book makes a big point of saying that the change in displacement is the same as the velocity times the change in time.”

“Okay,” he said. “How would you write that down?”

“Gack. I don’t know,” I said. ‘But you were asking me how far something had traveled. And these things all seem to be related. Change in displacement, velocity, change in time.”

He wrote Δs = vΔt on the blackboard behind us. “Does that ring any bells?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said, “but the textbook did use delta for ‘change’ so if displacement is ‘s’, velocity is ‘v’ and time is ‘t’, that’s what I just said, yes, sir.”

“And you never saw this before?” he asked.

“No sir.” We went on for maybe half an hour, and I explained how it looked like four or five equations would suffice to figure out missing variables in straight line acceleration problems. He was very keen on the idea that someone must have explained this to me before.

“I’m sorry, Professsor, and I really didn’t mean to take up so much of your time. This was just an idea that occurred to me while I was looking through the book. I’m sure nothing will come of it.” He’d written five equations on the blackboard. I had no idea what he was getting at.

“And you’ve never been taught physics before?” he asked again.

“No, sir. But I’ll study hard, I promise.”

“That’s not the point,” he said. “I don’t see the world this way, so I don’t teach it as such, but there are many physics instructors who teach their students how to solve uniform acceleration problems with these same five equations that you claim to have deduced in a few minutes before class began. If true, you have a remarkable mind and a remarkable affinity for the subject matter. I’ve never seen anything like it. If it’s true.” Gack. He thought I was lying to impress him. I thought I was bullshitting.

“I know you don’t know me, but I really have no interest in impressing people,” I said, “and I really don’t like calling attention to myself, and really, those five equations seemed to be pretty much calling out from the order in which the problems were presented.”

He thought a minute. “Whichever way it works out, good luck with the class,” he said.

“Thank you sir,” I said, and left. College was weird already.

My first math class was next. The classroom was in a building next door, large for a classroom but still much smaller than the amphitheater. Maybe forty-five desks. I took a seat close to the back. There were a few students already present, all flipping through the textbook. Unlike the physics class, none of them seemed to know each other. The Physics students had tended to clump up in groups of three four or five. The Math students seemed to disperse as far as possible, maintaining the maximum amount of separation. When they sat down, they didn’t look around for people they knew, they looked down. At their books, at their notebooks, at something they were reading. None of them looked around much. Their dispersal in the classroom they would have reminded a chemistry student of an ideal gas obeying Boyle’s law, but since this was math I guess id didn’t count.

Eventually someone took the desk to my right. He looked around before he sat down a little more than the others, but he never really looked at me. He opened his textbook and tried to look at it for a few seconds then looked up again. He fidgeted a little. He was wearing a Texas orange tee shirt , grey pinstriped bell-bottomed suit pants, and brown suede cowboy boots. His jaw-length hair was parted in the middle and kept in place by a beaded headband of a vaguely Hindu design. Or maybe Jain. What do I know?

He saw me looking at him. I looked down at my book, trying to fit in.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I answered.

“This is Math, right?” he asked.

“Mathematics 150a. Single Variable Calculus,” I said.

“Good. Thanks. I’m pretty fucked up and sometimes I walk into the wrong class by mistake. Last year I went into multi-variable differentiation and sat down and was takin’ notes and shit and I could totally follow it all and the fuckin’ prof started raggin’ on me about being in the wrong class and all and I said ‘Cool it man. I can like totally dig this class’ and he asked me a question about differentiating this three variable problem he was working on and I totally knew the answer but when I answered right he was still mad but I thought if I could do the work I oughta be allowed to stay but he was totally like you’re just a freshman and you need to go to Math 140 down the hall and it was a calculus survey that was like totally bogus high school math. I like went to none of the classes and got like the highest grad in the class and all.”

“So you’re high on marijuana?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. And a little coke. I’m Stoney,” he said, and held out his hand.

“Stoney?” I asked.

“Actually it’s not my name. That’s a nickname. My real name is Tom Jackson, but everybody calls me Stoney on account of my name.”

“I don’t get ‘Stoney’ from ‘Tom,’” I said. “Are you sure it’s your name that got you that nickname?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Thomas Jonathan Jackson. That’s me. Also Old Blue Light.” I had no idea what he was talking about, and it showed. “You don’t know Stonewall Jackson? ” he asked.

“Oh, God. Yes. Sorry,” I said. “I’m Henry.” I shook his still-outstretched hand.

“How’s it goin’, Henry?” he said. “So what do you think this class is going to be about?” he asked.

“Let’s look at the book,” I said.

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “I’m pretty fucked up.”

“On reefer and coke,” I said.

“There may have been some tequila involved, too” he said. “I kinda forgot today was the first day of class, then I remembered and came running over, and running got everything kinda churned up inside me. I shoulda maybe cut class, but I’m already here and it’s the first day and all. Besides I don’t really want to walk very far right now.”

Just so you know, the class began at 11:00 a.m.

“Okay, Stonewall, I’ll read you the topics from the table of contents for the first few chapters.”

“Far out. Thanks,” he said. He closed his eyes and composed himself as though meditating.

“Functions. Limits. Differentiation of Algebraic Functions. Applications of Differentiation. Integration.”

After a few seconds he opened his eyes. “What? That’s it?” he asked.

“Afraid so,” I said.

“Aw, fuck. Another fucking high school class.”

“It is pretty lean,” I agreed.

“I’m a fucking sophomore at this Mickey Mouse fucking school and I still haven’t taken a single fucking course that teaches me a single fucking thing. If I could walk I’d leave here right now.”

“I’m with you,” I said.

“You’re stoned, too?” he asked. “Man, you don’t show it.”

“No, no. I’m straight,” I said. He thought a minute.

“You’re a sophomore, too?” he asked, tentatively.

“Nah, I’m a freshman.”

“Then why the fuck aren’t you in that lame-ass Math 140 fucker?” he asked.

“You can skip it with faculty advisor approval.”

“Who’s your advisor?” he asked, after taking a second to focus.

“Dr. Ladd.”

“Mine, too. I begged and pleaded with that motherfucker not to make me take that 140 course, but he said high school math courses were unreliable. Fuck that. I was in AP math and my math teacher’s day job was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He fucking owned math,” said Stoney.

“Where’d you go to high school?” I asked.

“Lawrenceville,” he said.

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“New Jersey. It’s right down the road from Princeton. It’s one of the big deal up-east boarding schools. You?”

“City High in Chattanooga, Tennessee.” I said.

“Yeah, I could tell you were Southern,” he said. “And you got good math at City High?”

“Yeah. Like you. Great teacher.”

“Far out. That’s really cool. Wake me when the prof gets here,” he said. He put his head down on his desk and fell asleep immediately.

“Looking through the book, it really was disappointing. In the entire semester, we weren’t going to study anything I didn’t already know.

After a few minutes, a youngish blonde man with slightly buck teeth came in to the classroom, closed the door behind him, and strode purposefully to the desk at the front of the classroom. He put his book and notebook on the desk and looked up. He was expecting us all to go silent, which we did, although it took a few seconds. He was wearing a blue blazer, grey flannel slacks, and a blue dress shirt whose collar did not button down. No tie. Which was wrong, since his collar didn’t button. I couldn’t see his shoes under the desk. “Good morning,” he announced, in a slightly over-loud voice, “I am Assistant Professor Wallace Wolfe. This is Mathematics 150, Single-Variable Calculus,” he said. I tapped Stoney on the shoulder. He’d asked me to let him know when class began. He sat up with a start.

“What the fuck?” said Stoney, under his breath. Prof. Wolfe noticed him.

“Oh, shit, not this fucker again,” said Stoney.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Jackson, I think it is?” asked Prof. Wolfe.

Stoney shook his head a little as if to clear the cobwebs. “No, doc. Sorry. I musta fallen asleep or something. Good to see you again.”

“This course, Mathematics 150, Single-Variable Calculus, is the most important math class you will take as an undergraduate. It will lay the foundation for all of the math you will study later, and mastering it cannot be overemphasized.”

“Jesus, what an asshole,” said Stoney, under his breath. He put his head back on his desk and appeared to fall asleep immediately.

“I cannot overstress the importance of this course,” said Asst. Prof. Wolfe, seeming slightly peeved at either Stoney’s presence or his slumber. “For those of you who have yet to explore Calculus, this course will open up new ways of seeing the world. For those of you who have studied Calculus, you will see the study in a new and more rigorous way. The holes in your understanding will be filled, and you will be prepared for higher math,” he said.

Stoney, who appeared to have been not so much listening as drooling, sat up long enough to fish some Ray-Ban aviators out of a pocket, put them on, and put his head back down, said, under his breath, “Lord fuck a duck, I’m stuck for eternity in Calculus one.”

Asst. Prof. Wolfe continued without commenting on Stoney. The students in nearby desks were ignoring him studiously. “Our methods will be rigorous. Our approach, absolute,” said Wolfe. “There can be no half-right answers in math, so do not expect accommodations. You are adults in the pursuit of higher learning. You must take what is yours, but expect no favors. Knowledge will be presented to you, but you must take it, you must learn it, you must embrace it. We will not feed it to you. You must grasp it and feed yourselves. Read through Chapter 1.6 and do all of the intervening problems before next class. Good day.” He picked up his books and strode manfully out of the classroom.”

Stoney sat up. “Jesus H. Christ. What an asshole,” he said. “Are you planning to come to class?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Wolfe isn’t spontaneous enough to do pop quizzes. Any way I can convince you to call me if he announces a test?”

“Bud, I’ll do my best, but I’m forgetful, and I don’t want it to be my fault if you fail.”

“I’ll give you some reefer for every test you tell me about,” he said.

“Don’t smoke it,” I said.

“I thought you were a Math major,” he said.

“Double major. Math and Physics,” I said.

He took off his sunglasses to look me in the eye. His were enormously dilated. “Math and Physics and you don’t smoke dope?” he asked, dubiously. I shrugged.

“Nope.”

He thought about it for a few seconds, quite intently. I looked back at him. “If I weren’t so totally in the bag I’d know what to do about this,” he said, and stood up. “But I’d still appreciate it if you’d call me when there’s going to be a test. I don’t seem to know anyone else in this class.” He replaced his sunglasses, picked up his textbook and stood. I stood, too. “Christ on a crutch, but I’m fucked up,” he said, and lurched out.

I had one other class that day, Greek, and it was on the other side of campus, in Furman Hall, a grey stone building that stood out amongst the red brick buildings that made up the rest of the campus. The night before I’d walked around and located the building but wasn’t sure about the room because the building had been locked up. I found the building again, and the classroom was up a flight of heavily, if indifferently, carpeted stairs that were part of a large central staircase that led both up and down from the ground-level entrance and seemed to render the entire floor-numbering idea somewhat ambiguous. There was no floor at ground level, although there was one a half floor below the entrance and another a half-floor above. My classroom, number 212, had a high-school-style glass panel door, a floor of various glossy beige linoleum squares, the requisite blackboard up front, and about twelve of those movable desks you have in high school. None were occupied, and they were all jumbled together in the right rear corner of the classroom, so, I pulled one out and sat in it. This felt very vulnerable. After sitting there for less than a minute but more than thirty seconds I got up and moved several other desks out into the classroom space. I spaced them randomly. I put maybe seven in various places around the classroom, most, but not all, vaguely pointing towards the desk at the front of the classroom. There was a lectern, too, but it was off in the corner. I sat back down at my desk and opened my textbook about twelve minutes before class was scheduled to start. I was still alone in the room. I began reading the first lessons. Greek is wonderful. From the start. Really. Not everybody can do math or physics, but you can learn Greek. And you’ll be much happier if you do.

A few minutes later, a young blonde woman in sunglasses, bell-bottomed jeans, a red, white and blue striped tube top, and wooden platform shoes maybe three inches high tossed the door open, looked around disapprovingly for a second, then strode on in. The shoes made a pronounced clip-clop sound on the linoleum as she walked. She selected a desk not far from me, straightened it out in a way that brought it closer to and in line with my desk, sat, and then stretched like someone waking up from a long sleep. It was odd, but eye-catching. She stared off into the middle distance for a minute. I looked back at my textbook. Another young woman appeared a few minutes later as if by magic. I hadn’t heard her entrance, but there she was, standing nearby, tall and slender, with shoulder-length brown hair and dark brown eyes. She was wearing beige linen slacks and a white cotton button-down shirt, only the collar tabs weren’t buttoned. She had a light dark brown cotton sweater tied around her shoulders and some kind of grey-to-beige leather shoes that seemed to be high heeled, although I couldn’t really see. She looked around, then pulled a desk in line with the other student and I. Ours seemed to be a self-organizing universe.

At this point we had desks arrayed in a straight line defined by three points determined by choice. Each of the women to my left and right had selected a classroom-appropriate distance, but both had chosen me as their apparent point of reference, which seemed weird. All I’d done was get there first. I was looking at my textbook—my feeling for Greek was love at first sight and this was the first time I’d ever really started looking at it—but both of them seemed to be glancing at me from time to time as though they knew me. Or expected me to say something. Or something. I smiled at first one, then the other, but was already memorizing the Greek alphabet. α…β…γ…δ…ε…ζ… It was rote work, but it felt good to look at it. Three or four more students came into the classroom, looked around, and moved desks into an indifferent line behind us. If’ I’m not mistaken, the two women to my left and right moved a tiny bit closer to me. Primary squatter’s rights, because we’d gotten there first?

I looked up to check out a noise behind me and to my left and in so doing, caught the eye of the young woman in jeans and a tube top. Pretty girl.

“Hey,” she said. She was still wearing her sunglasses. Round ones with gold rims. “I don’t recognize you.”

“I’m Henry,” I said. “I’m new here.”

“A transfer student?” she asked.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m a freshman.”

“And you’re taking Koine ?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. I’m not good at this kind of social chitchat. It seems odd to me for a stranger to ask me questions, but there wasn’t really a reason not to answer.

“I was expecting most of the people in here to be philosophy majors,” she said. “I don’t recognize anybody though.” She looked at me for a minute with what seemed like a strangely piercing stare. “I’ve got it,” she said after a few seconds. “You were in Viet Nam.” I could sense the woman to my right looking up at this.

“No,” I said, “I just want to study Greek.”

“So you weren’t in the military?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.” What in the world was she getting at?

“Well, that’s good,” she said. “I’m a Philosophy major, and we talk about the War a lot.”

“Isn’t it kind of over?” I asked.

She looked at me somewhat judgmentally for having asked this question. “It’s true that the worst of the hostilities seem to be over, and that Ho Chi Min’s freedom fighters seem to have won. But as philosophers we’re still sifting through the political and ethical detritus of the debacle to place the entire episode in its proper historical and moral perspective.”

“I know an Amtrak employee you should talk to,” I said.

“Amtrak?” she asked.

“Yes. Amtrak.”

“What’s Amtrak?”

“It’s what’s left of passenger rail service in the United States following the Nixon administration’s reorganization of everything.”

“Well. We know Nixon is a criminal, but I don’t know much about this train thing,” she said.

“Four years ago, there was passenger rail service to thousands of little towns all over the South. Nixon took over the passenger rail service with this Amtrak deal, and all that’s gone now. Outside of Georgia, you can only catch passenger rail at big cities on major lines. All the feeders are gone,” I said. She looked at me for a few seconds. Two or three more students wandered into the classroom and pulled up desks behind those of us already there.

“I really think bombing Cambodia and deciding to bug the DNC headquarters are bigger issues than this train trip you’re on,” she said. As soon as she said that the classroom door swung open again and Prof. Krawiec came in. He paused at the door to survey us, and we all turned to look at him. He clearly paid attention to his clothing and hair. He was wearing an extremely carefully tailored, custom-made, dark caramel brown polyester suit, a canary yellow cotton shirt, and a dark brown and blue striped tie. He had an extremely full head of hair, carefully coiffed in an attempt to conceal an ear-to-ear comb-over, and a well-groomed beard. Hair and beard may have been dyed a walnut brown.

“Good morning boys and girls,” he said, from the doorway. “I am Prof. Kraweic, chairman of the Classics Department. This is Koine Greek. I don’t know most of you, so by way of introduction, I’d like to go around the room and ask everyone here why they want to study Koine. I’ll start with you,” he said, pointing to the young woman to my right, the pale blonde in the tube top. He walked to the front of the classroom, placed his books on the desk and moved the lectern to the center of the front of the classroom, a few feet in front of me.

“Me?” she said, removing her sunglasses. She looked around a bit as Prof. Krawiec nodded. “Hi. I’m Mary,” she said. “I’m a philosophy major, and I want to read Plato and Aristotle in their original language. I think subtleties can be lost in translation.”

“Thank you,” said Prof Krawiec, and looked at me.

“I’m interested in the New Testament,” I said. “Also Aristotle, I guess.”

“And your name is?” he asked.

“Henry. Henry Baida.”

“Ah. Mr. Baida, are you aware that your initials have a numerical significance in Greek?”

“Yes, sir. I think my father planned it that way. He was born in 1927 and believed in symmetry.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me later. And what parts of Aristotle interest you?” he asked. I got the feeling that he didn’t like me for some reason.

“The æsthetics, mainly. The Poetics and Rhetoric. I really like his writings on rhetoric.” He looked at me briefly as though I were trying to con him about something.

He looked at the young woman to my right. “And you are?” he asked.

“Mary Roberts,” she said. “This is my language elective.”

“And why did you choose Koine Greek as your language elective, Miss Roberts?” he asked.

“I’ve heard that you get a much clearer idea of what Jesus actually said if you read His words in Greek,” she said.

“Ah,” he replied. “I must presume you are right. The rest of the students were named Meg, Randy, Ginny, and Ralph, and their aspirations were somewhat vaguely expressed. They all just seemed to want to know Greek, and when Prof. Krawiec asked Meg why she chose Koine over Attic Greek, her answer, that the Attic course conflicted with one of her nursing courses, seemed to irritate him. His questions to the remaining few of my classmates was perfunctory. At the end of our introductories, he grasped the lectern in a meaningful way and sighed.

“I expect you’re wondering why such an important course is so poorly attended,” he asked. “I share this wonderment. It is singular that in Shakespeare’s day, grade school students in small villages could translate Greek into Latin and conversely, but now, 410 years later, a rudimentary understanding of either language is considered exotic. Here, though, you will learn Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world at the time of Nero, at the time of Aristotle, at the time of Christ. When the Roman Empire was at the height of its powers, the citizens of Rome were much more likely to speak Greek than Latin. When Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations, fluency in Greek was assumed even in Rome, and fluency in Latin was not, at least outside the nobility. Thus Greek was the language of both philosophy and commerce.” In what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech, he talked about the history of Greek, and how a wide variety of island and other local dialects, and several different writing styles, had boiled down to three or four dominant dialects by the time of Thucydides, and then how Alexander’s army had taken Koine, probably a Macedonian variant of Attic, with them around the Mediterranean as they conquered everything they encountered, then pressed the conquered locals into Alexander’s army, where they learned Koine Greek at spear-point. What could be fairer than that? Aristotle, Alexander’s teacher, wandered around with him on his conquests, recording his thoughts in Koine and leaving an intellectual legacy that it would take the Reformation, the Renaissance, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and hundreds of years of biological and botanical observation to overcome. “I want you to read all of chapter one. You should plan to have the Greek alphabet, both capital and small letters, memorized by this coming Monday, to be able to write all the letters, and recite the alphabet in order as well. Until you accomplish that, we will make little progress, so do it quickly. That will be all for today.”

We all gathered our things and walked out. The young woman in the tube top seemed irritated with me, the one in the linen slacks seemed to like me. Or something.

First day of college done.