I threw myself into my studies with a dizzying intensity. I did not dare return to Afro. In fact, I turned as far away from it as I could. It was after Jennifer that I began my study of Roman civilization. It started as these things often do—thoughtlessly. I had seen photographs of some statuary that I liked, had some idle notion that studying the classics would somehow make me less vulnerable both academically and personally. Serious study of the classics was viewed as an oddity by most at this time, particularly by a Negro. But perhaps that’s what I liked about it—it fed my newfound need for solitude. And it wasn’t long before it became a passion with me—the clarity and the force of the thought. The organization and rigor of the civilization. Rome at her best seemed to me to be everything that America hoped to be at her best. And wasn’t that what we had been working toward, after all? When I tried to make this analogy to my classmates, I was met with derision. But I didn’t care. I was already growing used to being alone, even as it pained me. And then one day, doing some reading for class, I found these words: “In fact, the whole passion ordinarily termed love (and heaven help me if I can think of any other term to apply to it) is of such exceeding triviality that I see nothing that I think comparable with it.” Cicero said that. That settled it for me. I longed to be so untouched. To possess the clarity that lay within those words. Sometimes I would recite them in my head as if they would save me.

I never talk about those days, the late 1960s. I know the young men here could not begin to understand what it was like, the belief that every action had some larger significance. The knowledge that being in college wasn’t some kind of birthright, but it was saving you from death in some far off-jungle. Or in my case, additionally, from being run down in some southern street like a dog. That was the other reason I took my studies seriously. They were, literally, saving my life. And I found, as I went further into my studies of Latin, that the clarity there was restful. These were men who knew what they wanted. Who were never afraid. They had standards that protected them.