From a piece in the Toronto Star, occasioned by the closure of some libraries:
Another autodidact remembers playing sports in a freezing rainstorm and being shouted at by his Latin teacher, “Never give up! Stop looking so miserable! Remember the Aeneid!”
Who was “Enid,” he wondered. And of course he reads Virgil’s Aeneid now and “keeps his anguish buried deep in his heart,” as Virgil put it in 19 BCE, though the emotional comfort books offer is not part of this column’s remit. Does anyone else now read Virgil? Self-taught people do.
But where do they turn now that harried teachers don’t force you to read and aren’t allowed to teach grammar because it’s too “eat your vegetables,” now that students are “customers” and learning is “fun?” Very little about the coming century will be fun for young people coated with lies that big.
New Jersey Shakespeare Festival telephone call, one morning in 1977. “About that play you did last night? OK, I know who Titus was, but who was Ronicus?”