“The early fourth-century villa at Piazza Armerina in central Sicily boasts a huge extent of mosaic floors…” (Elsner, ch. 2)
I read this sentence for a seminar, and now everything stops. My mind is no longer in the present but somewhere in the distant past. But, no, it was only a year ago. The memory comes in piecemeal, but now as I sit and wait (and wish you believed in superstition? No, no, not Jack Johnson!), they crystalize in my mind’s eye. Somewhere in the borderlands (nope, not Providence Gap) between here and now, not waking or day dreaming, not wholly there or wholly here, but (stop me before I wax poetic. Oh, too late)—
This is what I remember. Standing on scaffolding, the cacophony of English-Italian mixed with the language of bees and rustling trees and the beating sun, children, so many rowdy children, getting angry and annoyed, an exhaustion overcome by the necessity to focus, absorb, remember, burn every sensation into my memory, a flash from some camera—NO FLASH!! Eleven of us screaming in agitation—oh yes, and the mosaics. Massive works of art constructed out of the tiniest pieces of glass or stone tesserae.
And now I admire the color, the stylized hunting scenes, the gods and goddesses, the aristocratic women playing beach ball, ancient conceptions of the known world displayed in the faces of exotic beasts. It was all there, all visceral and immediate. Now, this sentence for my seminar all makes sense. Every “academic” memory functions as an inseparable unit that floats around in my head and mixes with the nostalgia of the moment. I have to remember the time I bought the soccer ball and ran down the street juggling it before I can remember that we were in Paestum.
On the CSA (Classics Semester Abroad), we saw monuments from the remains of the Roman Forum, The Hadrianic Bath—but, no, this isn’t right. You can find our itinerary anywhere (shameless plug, just visit our website from the trip: CSA, 2014 Website).
I want it to be personal, but, now, writing this, I’m frustrated with the inability to capture it all and recreate it (not just in my head, but for you, on this page).
Every memory is tinged with a deep understanding of the very singularity of that moment. I may go back to Italy or Greece or Germany or even Turkey, but I will never get to pee in a ditch on the side of a deserted road with Dr. Neumann and Dr. Ingram, I’ll never almost push Will off the Areopagus, Renato and I will never be chased by a dog in Iraklion, I’ll never go on a scavenger hunt set up by my sister in Berlin that ended with MC, Will, and I crawling around the floor to find a snap bracelet she had put there a month earlier.
To say that it was “once in a lifetime” is an overstatement. Or maybe it’s an understatement. Every experience, theoretically, happens once in a lifetime. “Surreal,” though, doesn’t suffice. There was something inherently imaginary about the CSA. It was never quite real in the getting ready, it was never real when we were there, and now, the nostalgia that just hits me like a truck when I least expect it (in dreams, in remembered phrase—efcharisto poli, signomi poli, endica endica—even in the sights and sounds of everyday life). It all makes something that definitively happened something that never could have.
To say that the CSA has without a doubt made me a better Classics Major is too reductive. It’s not a trip for Classics Majors; it’s a trip for adventurers. For people who want to tap into the pastiche of human life. The CSA gave me perspective; it made me realize the totality of a life that has been and still is—the ancient world never died. Something you may have heard from Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” The people who live where we roamed and even the ephemeral travelers much like ourselves constantly interact with “the ancients” (who, then, can we say, become “the presents”?).
Ultimately, my advice for future CSA students is necessarily contradictory and intentionally limited:
- Take photos (and videos!). But stop to let every sensation of the moment matriculate into your memory through un-mediated interaction (and osmosis! You’d be surprised how many things you remember without actively trying to remember them)
- Eat an olive at Malia, pluck a fig from a tree in Turkey, take an orange off the road in Pilos, and know that none of them will ever taste good.
A cliché quote from A League of Their Own to finish: “It’s the hard that makes it great.”