The World is Dark and Full of Terrors

This last weekend was my breaking point, in terms of how much terrible news I can handle. I know many of us are uncomfortably numb, or have stopped checking the news so compulsively, or have found whatever other ways they can to function and process the speed and frequency of tragedy. Just last weekend, we saw the ongoing struggle in Puerto Rico, where the people were decimated by a hurricane and then largely abandoned. There’s an ongoing genocide of the Rohingya, there was violence in Spain over the Catalonian independence vote. I’m sure more happened last weekend. That’s layered on top of the constant political division and turmoil in our country, which leads to a seemingly unending string of crises about health care, and there’s the constant background threat of nuclear war. Race relations are catastrophic and showing no particular signs of improving. White supremacy, wealth inequality, Russia, police violence, and so on. On top of that, there was an unprecedented (for now) mass shooting, and that was more than I could take in stride.

I teach very narrowly specific classes, and the state of the world doesn’t often seem directly relevant to my classes (I currently teach a Greek poetry course — in ancient Greek — and a beginning Ancient Greek course). Further, I’m an expert on Ancient Greek — I’m not an expert on processing tragedy and trauma. I don’t feel particularly qualified to open up these conversations. There are others who are more qualified to do so.

That said, I don’t know that my students are going to choose to seek out those more qualified figures. My students may never go anywhere else to talk through their reactions to the world around them, but I do have them in my classroom, and I have to think that my job as an educator extends a little more broadly than just making sure my students have learned how to conjugate Greek verbs. And maybe I’m not entirely unqualified to talk about these difficult topics. If I really believe that the job of the humanities is (in some sense) to explore what it is to be human — and I do believe this — then can’t I speak about those quintessentially human experiences of grief and pain and sadness that seems too big for any one person to comprehend?

In the end, I decided to find a way to have one foot in ancient grief and one foot in modern grief. I bugged Joel Christensen/Sententiae Antiquae on Twitter to see if he had any Greek passages that I could use in my class. If nothing else, this let me start with what I am an expert in and what the class is about (learning to read Ancient Greek) and segue from there to opening up space to at least acknowledge the state of the world and recognize that pain is a reasonable response to tragedy. First of all, I need to thank Joel for this wonderful post he compiled in response to my request: Words, Friends, and the Future: Solace and Distraction for the Pain

Because I’m teaching beginning Greek students, a lot of this Greek is beyond them, so I’ve made a modified version that was generally suitable for my students (below). This won’t work for all beginning Greek courses, but it should be largely accessible to most courses (my students have had 6 weeks of Athenaze). I removed it for posting here, since it was Notre Dame-specific information, but at the bottom of this handout I listed the mental health and counseling resources on campus. It works out nicely that one of the counseling services offered here is called Let’s Talk, since so much of this Greek addresses talking to friends as a way to process grief.

I wanted to make this available for anyone else who might find it useful in their classes. The goal wasn’t to suggest that the Ancient Greeks had better answers than we do, but instead to acknowledge that it’s ok to be wondering how best to find solace and that I too am wondering how to find solace. In explaining why I had made this handout for them, it gave me an opening to explain that the past weekend was difficult for me. I don’t know if any of my students heard what I said and began to feel like their feelings were legitimate, but if there’s even a chance that it did, it was worth the time it took to gloss these words and the vulnerability it took to talk frankly about my feelings in class.

Finally, here are two wonderful resources on this topic which have helped me get my thoughts in order and made me feel like I needed to at least respond in some capacity:

• By the thoughtful and talented Katy Peplin: You Need to Address Charlottesville (and everything else) in your Classroom
• From CMU’s Eberly Center: Teaching after tragedy: What can instructors do to support students?

On Consolation and Sadness (PDF) (Word doc)

From the Suda (a 10^th century Byzantine encyclopedia/lexicon)

Euripides, Helen 698-699

Basil (Saint Basil, 4^th century CE Bishop of Caesarea who wrote many letters)

Letter 131

 Letter 302

Thucydides, book 5

Some Proverbs from Arsenius, Paroemiographer

 Euripides, fr. 1079