CARSON
....At least
half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last.
It’s a good Buddhist attitude. It prepares you for life as a Buddhist.
If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just
sad.
INTERVIEWER
You would be well on the road to enlightenment if you were a Buddhist.
CARSON
Instead, I’ve avoided enlightenment resolutely.
INTERVIEWER
I’d like to talk a little bit about your discovery of ancient Greece. You first started studying Greek in high school?
CARSON
Yes. Grade thirteen.
INTERVIEWER
Was it immediately apparent that it was changing your life?
CARSON
Yes, immediately. Mrs. Cowan started to teach me Greek—she was our
Latin teacher in high school, in Port Hope—but she also knew Greek, so
she offered to teach me because she found out I was interested in it, so
we did it on our lunch hour.
INTERVIEWER
There wasn’t a Greek class?
CARSON
No. No one was interested except me. We read Sappho together, and it
was simply revolutionary. I don’t know every language in the world—maybe
if I knew Sanskrit and Chinese I would think differently—but there’s
something about Greek that seems to go deeper into words than any modern
language. So that when you’re reading it, you’re down in the roots of
where words work, whereas in English we’re at the top of the tree, in
the branches, bouncing around. It was stunning to me, a revelation. And
it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always
welcoming. Strange, but welcoming.
INTERVIEWER
That must be really nice, to have that place to go to.
CARSON
It is. I’m sure it’s part of what mental health I have. A large part.
It’s a home. It’s a home in my mind. And then to be able to make my
living at it is a great benevolence of the universe.
INTERVIEWER
A lot of people say the ancient Greeks are really our contemporaries. Spiritually, I mean.
CARSON
I don’t feel much direct relevance of ancient things to modern
things. It was the temper of the times, especially in the seventies and
eighties when I was getting my degree and teaching, to claim that the
project of being a classicist was to find relevance to antiquity and
invent courses that convinced students that you could learn everything
you needed to know about modern life from studying the ancient Greeks.
Well, this is bizarre, to say the least. What’s entrancing about the
Greeks is that you get little glimpses, little latches of similarity,
embedded in unbelievable otherness, in this huge landscape of strange
convictions about the world and reactions to life that make no sense at
all.
INTERVIEWER
So there’s this dense otherness that you just want to find out about. Whether it’s relevant is besides the point.
CARSON
One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too,
understood this and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a
principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it
bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still
in yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as another. It’s what
they call "ecstasy." The Greeks invented this concept, but they also
embody it for us, which may just be just our utilitarian approach to
them. But who can say. We are always going to be looking at the Greeks
and figuring out who they are in relation to what we are. We can’t get
out and be in a third place and judge both of us.
INTERVIEWER
From a nice objective place?
CARSON
There is no objective place, just like there is no third gender; you’ve got to be in one place or the other.- Anne Carson's Paris Review interview