'A Moralizing Purge of the Past'

"I think we are living through a moralizing purge of the past, similar to the one that early Christianity inflicted on the same pagan learning. There will be another Dark Ages in our lifetimes; and another Renaissance, too, but not one that we will live to see.” 

I’m always surprised to learn that someone on the university faculty or staff is a reader. Six years ago, I was part of the search committee looking to replace my longtime boss, the woman who hired me twice and now was retiring. I sat in on eight interviews, a demoralizing experience. Some of the questions were assigned to me, but each of us was free to ask one of our own. “What book are you reading now,” I would inquire, “or did you most recently finish reading?” Not one had an answer. I expected at least one to be reading a popular self-help title or a thriller. Some were sheepish, embarrassed that their answer might not look good. Others unapologetically admitted they were not “book people.”

 

Good news of late. Two women have been hired who are not allergic to reading. One was born in Rumania and earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Brown. When I recommended a novel by Andrey Platonov she actually read it (preceded by The Foundation Pit) and suggested I read a novel by her country’s Max Blecher. The other is homegrown, from Oklahoma. She majored in classical studies, sent me an Ides of March joke, and we’ve compared our experiences with the Loeb Classics.

 

The passage at the top is taken from “The Hammer in the Ear,” a 2021 interview with Amit Majmudar published in The Classical Outlook. He is a poet, novelist, translator and diagnostic radiologist in Columbus, Ohio. Majmudar continues:

 

“The Greco-Roman classics have everything to offer our contemporary world, including an understanding of our own barbarization and vulgarization—but the contemporary world is too barbarized and vulgarized by now to understand that.”

 

Here Majmudar links his professional status in medicine to his early exposure to the classical languages:

 

“I was first immersed in Latin and Greek through the hybrid jargon of anatomy. I use that every day as a radiologist. Greek and Latin are the sister tongues of the body’s cartography. As a medical student, I was able to memorize the places and landmarks of the human body by calling on those etymologies, those hidden meanings. The malleus is not just an ossicle in the ear, it’s a hammer. Everything I dictate in my Radiology reports on a daily basis harks back to the Loeb Classics I used to parse, going back and forth to see what meant what. Radiologists do not say behind the outer part of the ear, we say retroauricular. When I say sacrum, as I do at least once a week, I am tickled to think I am saying that bone is holy. Galen called it the hieron osteon and so the Romans called it the os sacrum and the Renaissance anatomists shortened that to sacrum, but it all goes back to how, in the pagan Mediterranean civilization, it was offered up during animal sacrifices. Because it was the seat of the reproductive organs, the seat of life and perpetuation, some believed the soul resided there, flanked as it is by the iliac wings, bony fossils of a creature that used to fly. So these ancient languages have a legacy beyond books and poems. They are the languages that map our bodies and our pain; that guide the biopsy needle to the lesion, the anesthetic to the grateful joint.”