I was living in Silicon Valley working for a startup...4 years out of college. A college friend of mine on the East Coast woke me up at like 730a Pacific time and told me to turn the TV on to any channel and hung up.
Took my brain a couple minutes to wake up and realize this was for-real real.
I was in my last year of college. I had gotten up early to finish some homework -- translating a poem from Latin. It was Horace. One of the Odes. The exact lines were:
Pallida mors pede aequo pulsat
Tabernas pauperum et turris regem
Which I rendered as:
Pale death knocks with impartial foot
At the hovels of the poor and the towers of kings
Then the phone rang and it was my roommate's mother to say "turn on the TV".
I will remember those two lines of Latin until the day I die.
That's beautiful by the way. You have a great way with words. Thanks for sharing. All I could do that day was go home and sob forever. Everything else seemed irrelevant. I couldn't put a coherent feeling or words to any of it.
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u/CaydeTheCat 15h ago
I was living in Silicon Valley working for a startup...4 years out of college. A college friend of mine on the East Coast woke me up at like 730a Pacific time and told me to turn the TV on to any channel and hung up.
Took my brain a couple minutes to wake up and realize this was for-real real.