GREEK TO ME
Adventures of the Comma Queen
Mary Norris’s “Greek to Me” is one of the most satisfying accounts of a great passion that I have ever read. It traces a decades-long obsession with Greece: its language (both modern and ancient), literature, mythologies, people, places, food and monuments — all with an absorption that never falters and never squanders the reader’s attention.
Norris is the famous New Yorker copy editor who wrote “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” a few years ago. That book — a record of her equally passionate relationship with punctuation — gave us a rich example of her noble predilection for knowing everything there is to know about a single subject. If Isaiah Berlin were alive today and able to read “Between You & Me,” I am certain he would have considered Norris a perfect candidate for inclusion in the category of hedgehog, his term for a person who works to know one thing completely, as opposed to the fox, who pursues many things superficially
Over a period of nearly 40 years, which has included countless trips to Greece, Norris’s experience of the country and all things Greek has remained ever fresh: Very nearly she believes it her destiny. In an oddly brooding way, it’s almost as though she thinks Greece has been there from the time she was young to rescue her from herself.
When Norris was a baby in Cleveland, a 2-year-old sibling died, and she grew up feeling irrationally guilty about that death. one of her most significant memories is of a college course in Greek mythology that somehow released her from this anxiety, providing her with the wherewithal to leave “girlhood for the life of a woman.” This longing for the magic of the ancient world repeated itself years later when, while taking a course in Greek tragedy at Columbia, she became convinced that whatever she read in that class “would put my own troubles in perspective.” At the end of her book, Norris visits the famous Dafni Monastery, which contains a particularly great Christ mosaic. If ever there was a moment when her infatuation with Greece and all things Greek seems to climax, this is it. The effect on her of that mosaic was almost miraculous. “My gratitude has made me easier to get along with ever since,” she writes.
Norris was about 30 when she took her first trip to Greece, came home besotted and lowered herself into the ocean of Greek studies available in New York City: “In the years that followed, I swung back and forth between modern Greek and ancient Greek, cramming modern Greek before a trip, returning to ancient Greek when I got home.” At one point she even moved to Astoria, the Greek-American neighborhood in Queens, embedding herself among living Greeks so that every waking hour away from her office she’d be surrounded by either the demotic Greek of the street or the Greek of Thucydides in her armchair.
In a small disquisition on the development of written language in ancient Greece, Norris tells us that the Greeks wrote words as run-ons: JUSTIMAGINETHAT. Spacing was “a great leap forward.” As was the invention of Norris’s beloved comma, which comes from the Greek word komma, and was invented to further clarify meaning. She also makes the interesting observation that with the advent of social media and online publication we seem to be regressing to those long-ago times by trading in “turnable pages sewn between covers” for scrolling, and by doing away with vowels, “now playfully omitted, as if they took up too much space.” She mourns the centuries-long effort at developing punctuation for the sake of ever greater clarity, now being abandoned, day by day, in our benighted contemporary culture. This observation is only a reminder of what we all know; nevertheless, it stunned me.
Two loves in particular dominate “Greek to Me”: the Acropolis and Homer, both of which Norris returns to so religiously that she often ends a passage about one or the other on a joking note, to avoid, I presume, sinking into sentimentality or self-dramatization. She tells us that one of the things she most loves about Homer is the ancient poet’s use of epithets (here meant only as an identifying trait, not a term of contempt). “Gray-eyed Athena” especially appeals to Norris because she herself has gray eyes. The passage ends: “The word that Homer relies on for Athena is glaukopis. … I would gladly step up to the epithet of Athena, but the form for a driver’s license does not have a box to check for the eye color ‘glaucous.’”
The book is structured not as a scholarly guide but as a presentation of the variousness of Norris’s Greek experiences held together by stretches of prose devoted, on the one hand, to her memories of early family life in Irish Catholic Cleveland and, on the other, to life on the copy desk at The New Yorker. Collectively, these strands lend the work a tone that suggests girlishness (Norris is 67).
She describes her studies with a mentor who was endlessly “indulgent of my desire to learn this immensely complex tongue and one day dance on a table in emulation of Zorba the Greek.” This remark could stand as an introduction to the many winking allusions to drinking and flirting (with sailors, guides, waiters) that are sprinkled throughout the book — allusions, I must say, that took me by surprise. Western women traveling to the Mediterranean in search of sensual experience is one of the great clichés I thought we had put behind us.
This caveat aside, Norris’s irreverent reverence for the history of the Greek language is not only admirable, it is moving. When she writes, “Ancient Greek is like the Bible (from βιβλος): records of the past that preserve the things that humans most need to know,” you feel yourself in the presence of a traveler whose authority emanates from lived experience.