CULTURE
My Child Caught Me Thinking About the Roman Empire
A couple of months ago, my daughter asked me a question so out of left field, yet so apropos, I reacted like a person witnessing a magic trick they couldn’t explain. “How often,” she asked, “do you think about the Roman Empire?”
When she posed this question, it just so happened that I was working on an essay on the parallels between ancient history and current events. A few minutes before she queried me about the Roman Empire, I’d deleted the following paragraphs from my draft, relegating them, as it were, to the cutting room floor:
[T]wo high points of my ill-fated collegiate career were freshman Western Civilization and English Composition.
After spending the first part of my freshman semester exploring the wonders of non-academic college life, I made an appearance in Western Civ just in time for a midterm exam I hadn’t bothered to study for. Although I was totally unprepared, somehow, I managed to eke out an A minus on the exam.
A few weeks later, I managed to get one of the top marks in my English Comp class for an essay I wrote forecasting that the United States would meet its demise in much the same way as the Roman Empire.
There was no way she could know about my deleted passage referencing my essay on the Roman…
