I watched them stream in, drawn to slides of artifacts and talk of ruins: snowy-haired, with canes and sensible shoes. They listened with hunger. It is a common by-product of aging, to find yourself reaching for the unreachable past, longing for the residue of bygone civilizations. The man next to me in the New York University auditorium—we were attending a conference called “Performing Memory in the Ancient World,” sponsored by the NYU Classics Department—leaned forward to concentrate. He was in his sixties, on the younger side in this room, a retired writer. He showed me his marked-up schedule for this conference, with other lectures circled. He was tearing himself away to run uptown to the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean at Columbia University to hear an Italian scholar talk about Pompeii. Would I save his seat? He figured he’d be back at this conference at NYU by lunchtime, and so he was, slipping into the same chair and opening his notebook. “Did I miss any handouts?”
