so typical

Here’s a page from one of the notebooks I was using in my first year of college. The thing is, I wasn’t taking German at the time. My best recollection (helped a bit by this notebook) says I had enrolled in Old Testament, Philosophy, Linguistics, and French.

Back to Roycemore

After my “gap year” in Bergamo, I returned to the refuge of my little prep school in Evanston. Somehow this schedule for fall semester 1980 has survived until today, hidden away in the agenda that I had bought for school in Italy, and continued to use that fall. Looking at the classes listed makes snapshot, or better, gif-like memories appear. They are few in number and play in short loops. If the locations of the classes weren’t also there, I’m not sure I’d even recover those.

Bergamo dream journal

As usual, I remember very little.

Mom and I were in England; we were going to see the Queen open parliament. First we were watching her go by, in the street; we were at the front of the crowd. Her vehicle (a bus) stopped; the crowd surge forward, the doors opened for a moment, then closed; on me! I was for a moment trapped; I looked up and the Queen was standing before me. Then the doors opened, and out I went.

The Persian Boy’s Army

When I got back [from a summer vacation trip], I took up THE PERSIAN BOY, a novel about Alexander the Great, in first person, through the eyes of Bagoas, supposedly his lover. It was extremely well written. I stayed up late (very late) Sunday night to finish it, and the end found me crying. It has been the only book that has ever done that to me.

Daniel Mendelsohn, noted classicist, author, and critic, is only a little older than myself, and I think he’s the only member of the PBA who has explained what the PBA is (I’m probably wrong about that, but I don’t get out much, you see). Ralph Gillies, of all people, gave me my copy of the Persian Boy when we were in 7th grade, though I’m pretty sure he hadn’t read it. He just thought I should have it because it was about the Alexander, but I could be wrong about that, too. Ralph was perceptive, and complicated. Also complicating my recollection is the fact that I didn’t actually read the book until the week before 9th grade. Mendelsohn first read Mary Renault six years earlier, and began a correspondence with her that more than entitles him to be the army’s leader for life. Like him, I went on to read most of her other work, and we were finally in sync when Renault published Funeral Games. Unlike Mendelsohn, I had no strong attraction to the classical world other than my namesake and a liking for history and historical fiction in general. Beginning with Andre Norton in 5th or 6th grade, I veered into fantasy and science fiction. But, both of us do share this: unrequited boyhood crushes, and our attempts to write fiction and keep a diary both petered out in our early twenties. I wonder how many other boys joined the Persian Boy’s Army, given how many letters Mary Renault received. Mendelsohn wrote, I asked where all these letters were and what had become of them. Owen said that they had been destroyed after Mary’s death, in part to protect the men who had written them. I thought of my onionskin pages, blackening and curling in the flames. At what age did the book find them, and how did it affect them? What I realized, reviewing my diary, is that I had read it just before meeting the unfortunate object of my first intense infatuation.