Last Class

Next class will be my last class. My final exam the following week, technically won’t count as instructional—perhaps only destructional. Two years, four semesters, 60 class periods, 200 hours of contact time (193 for me, as I missed two classes), with another 400-500 hours of study—hard time, but life well spent. My grade going into the final has risen to A-/B+. The language is not getting easier, but I think the quizzes are. Not complaining, just observing.

Is it heresy for me, an academic professional, a university citizen, to confess that as much as I love learning, reading, and studying, I’m tired of schooling? The accountability, the grading has rendered the pursuit much less leisurely, much less liberal; and then there’s the memorization. Perhaps I’ve learned Polish as well as Polish can be learned in this way and in this time. Perhaps I’ve laid the firmest of foundations. Maybe even probably. But however well-disposed I remain toward my subject matter—Polish language, literature, and culture—and my professor and classmates, the regime of exercise, quiz, and exam wears a man down, unschools him. We have the medieval university to thank for this, of which, Poland has one, Jagiellonian University in Kraków (1364) and about which we read for next week to close out this cycle.

Getting There

With less than a month of classwork ahead, I have been meditating next steps. I have considered, more speculatively than seriously, the quite romantic act of chucking it all—my current life—and disappearing, stowing away on a tramp steamer or going before the mast, a deck hand on some shadowy merchantman, bound for Gdansk. Slip into the country, have adventures, master the language, become Polish. A few onlookers and overhearers have recommended this very course of action, or something like it, the great leap of faith, the all-in, the deep immersion, polonization by total osmosis—also known as an invitation to drowning. That’s not how I do things. And I rather like my current life, which deserves better than chucking.

Instead, in the esoteric human resource texts at the university in which I have labored lo this quarter century, my supervisor has located a section, relatively recent, on the recess appointment. In times of budgetary uncertainty, when the two parties are in agreement, the university and the employee may agree to reduce the latter’s appointment to as little as 50% time, with the university maintaining his health benefits. The possibility of doing my work, academic advising, by means of email and Skype has become increasingly, technologically attractive. So that instead of a leap of faith, I could make my typical classical little hop. In my experience, one doesn’t have to go looking for adventure; if you’re curious, it finds you. 

Verbs of Fear

On rare occasions a textbook can hit, probably unconsciously, an unexpectedly fine stylistic and philosophical note. This week as we survey the main uses of the Polish conditional—a tongue-twisting mood of consistent impossibility, for example, przemilczelibyśmy, “we (masculine or mixed gender groups) would/might be silent”—main use letter e. reads as follows:

Following verbs of wanting, doubting, fearing:

Since the whole of life demonstrably (viz. Gautama Buddha) consists of wanting, doubting, and fearing, what need then, really, of the indicative or the imperative mood? (A good question for all languages; though, I suppose that the interrogative could survive as a sort of yang to the conditional yin.) Thankfully, or not, the Buddha wasn’t Polish, and so the wheel of suffering/learning rolls on. Quiz tomorrow.

Use e. works like this: whenever you use a verb like chcieć (“to want”) or wątpić (“to doubt”) or bać się (“to be afraid”) to introduce a verb phrase or a subordinate clause, you would incline to using the conditional verb form in what follows, for example:

Boję się, żebym nigdy nie zrozumiał jędzyka polskiego. (“I fear that I might never understand the Polish language”). Strangely, ironically, beautifully, Professor Swan adds,

Verbs of fearing and doubting may also be followed by the indicative, in case there is greater certainty regarding the “feared” or “doubted” event.

In which case, the indicative: Boję się, że nigdy nie zrozumiem jędzyka polskiego. (“I fear that I will never understand the Polish language”). Hopefully, the Buddha proves correct, and that this latter seeming certainty will evanesce for what it is, an illusion, and I will understand Polish, not perfectly perhaps, ever, but sufficiently, significantly enough.