Greek Monologue

I was planning to sign up for Greek again, as it was the only language at which I was at all proficient. But when I told this to the academic counselor to whom I had been assigned—a French teacher named Georges Laforgue, with olive skin and a pinched, long-nostriled nose like a turtle’s—he only smiled, and pressed the tips of his fingers together. “I am afraid there may be a problem,” he said, in accented English.
“Why?”
“There is only one teacher of ancient Greek here and he is very particular about his students.”
“I’ve studied Greek for two years.”
“That probably will not make any difference. Besides, if you are going to major in English literature you will need a modern language. There is still space left in my Elementary French class and

Laforgue’s answer surprised me. “It’s nothing like that,” he said. “Of course he is a distinguished scholar. He happens to be quite charming as well. But he has what I think are some very odd ideas about teaching. He and his students have virtually no contact with the rest of the division. I don’t know why they continue to list his courses in the general catalogue—it’s misleading, every year there is confusion about it—because, practically speaking, the classes are closed. I am told that to study with him one must have read the right things, hold similar views. It has happened repeatedly that he has turned away students such as yourself who have done prior work in classics. With me”—he lifted an eyebrow—“if the student wants to learn what I teach and is qualified, I allow him in my classes. Very democratic, no? It is the best

Papen,” he said, almost as if he were consoling me on the death of a beloved friend, trying to make me understand that he was powerless to help me in any substantial way. “But I have limited myself to five students and I cannot even think of adding another.”
“Five students is not very many.”
He shook his head quickly, eyes shut, as if entreaty were more than he could bear.
“Really, I’d love to have you, but I mustn’t even consider it,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry. Will you excuse me now? I have a student with me.”

More than a week went by. I started my classes and got a job with a professor of psychology named Dr. Roland. (I was to assist him in some vague “research,” the nature of which I never discovered; he was an old, dazed, disordered-looking fellow, a behavioralist, who spent most of his time loitering in the teachers’ lounge.) And I made some friends, most of them freshmen who lived in my house. Friends is perhaps an inaccurate word to use. We ate our meals together, saw each other coming and going, but mainly were thrown together by the fact that none of us knew anybody—a situation which, at the time, did not seem necessarily unpleasant. Among the few people I had met who’d been at Hampden awhile, I asked what the story was with Julian