Dreaming in Latin

[breakinglight11]

I read a passage in Latin last night, and I found I had a shockingly strong emotion reaction to it.

Not to the passage itself, which was a basic present-tense narrative you'd see for practice in a textbook. But to the process of reading it, and to the discovery that I could. I took two years of Latin in high school from pure love, and one last my senior year of college. I got decently good at it, to my pleasure, as I love the sound of it, the history and the grandeur it conveys. I wanted to know it to include in my writing, which always leaned toward depicting the long ago and far away.

I was pleased I still could read any of it at all, since I have not studied it at all in like eight years. But I did love Latin, and would love to really be good at it. I saved my college textbook specifically so someday I could use it to improve on my own. But I never did. I've been so busy, so focused on things that were more important to me, that I never really had any spare effort to put towards it. As worthy a pursuit as it is, I decided a while ago that I was going to be putting pretty much all foreign language learning aside as something I just couldn't prioritize given all the other things I do and want to be good at.

God knows I'm full up right now. So much so I'm hovering near exhaustion, and it's only going to get heavier from here. But I got such a joy out of reading that little Latin practice passage. And I am working on the Adonis stories. It would be very cool if I could include a little Latin in those. It would be lovely if I could brush up on it and pick it back up again.