Perhaps I shall finish it and publish. For the next year, we find steady references to his task, which enters into the rhythms of his family life, his activities in his law practice, and the workings of the state legislature. It is memory of Virgil and his boyhood love of Virgil and Latin poetry that brought Long back to the poet. A cloudy, rainy, misty, and muddy day. Our school keeps two or three weeks longer.
Libraries ensure that memory survives.
Widener Library, and its tangible, browsable, stacks, is a storehouse of memory, much like the Greek Mouseion of Alexandria, a home and support to scholars, who were also attendants of the Muses, those daughters of Memory. Like us, they were concerned with the Humanities, with preserving the memory of the best that has been thought and written. Conversely, memory is what connects us to what matters for our lives as scholars, teachers, and members of human communities. By browsing in the stacks of Widener, we met Virgil and his translators, and we met John Davis Long, translator of Virgil and Secretary of the Navy, and we saw him taking from the Harvard College Library the books that would help create his own life, as a poet, politician, father and husband, in short as an admirable human being. Front cover of Long's Aeneid.