Each summer, our faculty get the chance to “flip the script” and join the Classical Reading Group. Led by one or more of the Latin faculty members, each session is devoted to a pairing of works – one ancient, one modern – that address similar themes through very different works.
Last summer, Latin teacher (2nd Street Upper School) Ben Nikota led discussions with his colleagues over Zoom (allowing faculty to participate no matter their summer travel or relocation). He paired Seneca’s essay, De Otio, about the leisure (the opposite of work) and how it should be used for the greater good with Bartleby, The Scrivener a novella about work by Herman Melville, in which the main character engages in acts of passive aggressive resistance.Another discussion featured Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, about a social climber and magistrate coming to terms with his own impending death, paired with Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, the Japanese post-war film based on that novella.
The discussions are lively and varied. One discussion featured a graphic novel, which led some faculty to struggle with processing the non-textual elements of the work. This adaptation demonstrates one goal of these reading groups (as in our Upper School classes): not only do we get to broaden our understanding of the Classical tradition, we also see how people have been inspired throughout the ages by the Classical work.
