While Valentine shopped, I realized there was someplace I needed to take Marlow [TCW’s seven year old daughter]. I ordered an Uber, and 15 minutes later the two of us were standing in the blazing heat of a not particularly well maintained public park in the nondescript Akadimia Platonos quarter, next to modest apartment blocks, auto-repair shops and Orthodox churches. With the aid of some precise geotags I had found on a particularly helpful blog, we located the unobtrusive signpost giving context and directions to the rectangles of stones protruding from the dirt in several expanses. “What are we doing?” Marlow asked, and I explained again that we were looking for the footprint of a structure that in some imagined but also not at all insignificant way had reached across millenniums to grab her grandfather and nudge him beyond his circumstances.

I repeated to her the anecdote about how my father discovered the image of Socrates, which led to a lifelong devotion to his student Plato, in whose dialogues his genius is preserved. Somewhere in this park there were the archaeological ruins of Plato’s Academy, where he taught, among others, Aristotle, tutor of Alexander the Great and one of the finest minds the world has ever witnessed. These men actually studied here, I told her. From 387 B.C., the academy endured until the death of its last head, Philo of Larissa, just over 300 years later. The ruins had been lost to history until only the 20th century. In another era we would have missed it.

We stood now in the original Grove of Academe, and I asked Marlow if she recognized the word from the top of all the papers her grandfather had given us. This plot of land was sacred according to classical mythology: It had been a haven to Athena since the Bronze Age and was subsequently named after its legendary owner, the hero Akademos, who had revealed to the Spartans where King Theseus had hidden Helen (not yet of Troy) and spared Athens bloodshed. It was for this reason that Plato called his school set on Akademos’ land an “aκαδημία,” and it’s because of that choice that centuries later the French “académie” would filter into English and eventually inform those toner-stained sheets of paper we both pored over.

I cannot overstate how exciting and moving this story is, at least to a father like me. It ends:

I told my daughter then that I don’t believe it is an exaggeration to say that — in some small but very real way — these rooms made possible our own fleeting existence.

Please, read the whole thing and send it on to everybody you know.

Contrast the fruitful encounter Williams père had with the Greeks to the one that another impoverished black boy, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, had as a Dominican immigrant living in a homeless shelter in New York’s Chinatown. From a NYT profile:

At the shelter, “the food tasted nasty,” and “pools of urine” marred the bathroom floor, Padilla wrote in his 2015 memoir, “Undocumented.” His one place of respite was the tiny library on the shelter’s top floor. Since leaving the Dominican Republic, Padilla had grown curious about Dominican history, but he couldn’t find any books about the Caribbean on the library’s shelves. What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines. “How many times have I taken an ax to this over the last decade of my career?” he said to me. “But at the moment of the initial encounter, there was something energizing about it.” Padilla took the textbook back to the room he shared with his mother and brother and never returned it to the library.

The story tells of how the Greeks liberated him. Padilla became a top Classics scholar — and is now using his prestige in the field, and his position at Princeton, to try to destroy the Classics discipline. More:

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

This is the way of the world today. The iconoclastic Padillas have the power. If the Classics are going to be saved for future generations, it’s going to require the efforts of parents like Thomas Chatterton Williams and his father, and parents like you and me. It will especially take starting and supporting classical schools — that is, schools that embrace and affirm the study of Greco-Roman culture as foundational to our tradition. A non-Christian friend who is the father of a small boy texted me recently to ask if I knew of any classical schools that aren’t affiliated with the Christian tradition. He wants his son to learn to love the Greco-Roman classics outside of a Christian ethos. If I were an educational entrepreneur, I would spy in this an opportunity. I think the Great Hearts academies provide what my friend is looking for, but I’m not entirely sure.

As my longtime readers know, encountering Dante amid a severe personal crisis saved my life. Dante was not of the Classical world, of course, but he’s relevant here because I had not imagined that a very long poem written by a medieval Tuscan could be so blazingly relevant to my own life in 21st century America. I discovered that Dante understood me better than I understood myself. I have never read anything that had such a profound impact on the way I saw myself. I think back with puzzlement and anger at the grad student who stood up once in the Q&A portion of a lecture I had just given on Dante, and asked me, with complete sincerity, why anybody should pay attention to Dante, as he is a dead white European male who wrote as a representative of an oppressive, bigoted culture.

This poor young woman had been taught by her university to blind herself, and call it liberation.

Those lucky Williams kids, having a daddy like that, and a grandfather like that. Here is a link to my 2012 account of going through the Louvre’s Greco-Roman collection with Matthew, who had just turned 13. We were on a family trip to Paris. I ended like this:

On and on like that. We finally had to leave, because it was too much.

Walking back across the river, I thought: I am so joyful we did this, this trip to Paris. Thank you, God, for giving this opportunity to us. It has been so thrilling. To walk through the Louvre with my son, to be with him in front of the Greek ceramics, and Pallas Athena, given how much pleasure we’ve had together reading “The Odyssey” — well, words can’t describe how much it meant to me. And to have him teaching me things as well! Something happened between us today to bring us closer, and has been happening with us since we started “The Odyssey” together. Dear readers, this has been a costly trip, in monetary terms, but the experiences we have been having are priceless. If something like this is at all within your means, please do it. Please!

Look what I just found: an earlier book of Williams’s, called Losing My Cool. From the Amazon description:

A pitch-perfect account of how hip-hop culture drew in the author and how his father drew him out again-with love, perseverance, and fifteen thousand books.

Into Williams’s childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. “Pappy” used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son’s pursuits were quite different-“money, hoes, and clothes.” The teenage Williams wore Medusa- faced Versace sunglasses and a hefty gold medallion, dumbed down and thugged up his speech, and did whatever else he could to fit into the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. Like all his friends, he knew exactly where he was the day Biggie Smalls died, he could recite the lyrics to any Nas or Tupac song, and he kept his woman in line, with force if necessary.

But Pappy, who grew up in the segregated South and hid in closets so he could read Aesop and Plato, had a different destiny in mind for his son. For years, Williams managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles- “keeping it real” in his friends’ eyes and studying for the SATs under his father’s strict tutelage. As college approached and the stakes of the thug lifestyle escalated, the revolving door between Williams’s street life and home life threatened to spin out of control. Ultimately, Williams would have to decide between hip-hop and his future. Would he choose “street dreams” or a radically different dream- the one Martin Luther King spoke of or the one Pappy held out to him now?

Williams is the first of his generation to measure the seductive power of hip-hop against its restrictive worldview, which ultimately leaves those who live it powerless. Losing My Cool portrays the allure and the danger of hip-hop culture like no book has before. Even more remarkably, Williams evokes the subtle salvation that literature offers and recounts with breathtaking clarity a burgeoning bond between father and son.

I found this short promotional video from 2010, in which TCW chats with his father Clarence about that book:

Clarence Williams is an American hero, and I mean that sincerely. TCW wrote about him in this NYT piece adapted from his most recent book, and how his father helped him to find his own true self. Excerpt:

Throughout my adolescence, largely spent on asphalt ball courts and planted in front of BET with what in retrospect appears a lot like the fervency of the convert, the zealously born-again, I consciously learned and performed my race, like a teacher’s pet in an advanced-placement course on cartoonish black manhood. Looking back, I am most jarred by the sheer artificiality of the endeavor. The genes I share with my father and others who look like us, which have kinked my hair and tinted my skin, do not carry within them a set of prescribed behaviors.

Blackness, as I inhabited it and it inhabited me, was not so much what you looked like — that was often a starting point, but there is no more physically diverse group of Americans than “blacks.” Rather, it grew into a question of how you spoke and dressed yourself, your self-presentation — how you met the world, the philosopher Martin Buber might say. Blackness was what you loved and what in turn loved or at least accepted you, what you found offensive or, more to the point, to whom your presence might constitute an offense. The 1990s will not go down in history as a particularly incisive political epoch in the history of black America. At the risk of overgeneralizing, when compared with the era we now inhabit, my generation’s youthful apathy seems outrageous. My friends and I tended to favor form over content, the cant of a brim or the jewel in an earlobe; race pride for us could boil down to nothing more than rhythm and athleticism, the way a person learned or didn’t learn to cut through the air; it was fussing over not looking fussed, the perpetual subterfuge of nonchalance.

There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we’re really talking about is class or, more accurate still, manners, values and taste. This is why an older blue-collar Italian friend of my brother’s could tell me foolishly but in all seriousness that my bookish father was “whiter” than his own financially secure but uneducated dad; and it’s why a tough black boy I met could step inside our tiny house, glance at our shelves and in the cramped kitchen at my blond mother cheerily baking snacks and declare against all evidence to the contrary, “Man, y’all are rich.”

Clarence Williams had married a white woman, TCW’s mother, whose father did not want to acknowledge that his daughter had ended up with a black man. In part because he had grown up in a culture that treated him and people like him unjustly because of the color of their skin, Clarence Williams believed it important that his sons have a black identity. But he did not want his sons to lose their individuality within a socially constructed identity. That is to say, Clarence Williams expanded their idea of what it meant to be black. He did not want his sons to think that being black meant performing “blackness” as conceived by the crowd. Why should a black man be thought of as less black because he loves Plato?

I had something like this in my childhood. I was raised in a family where educational achievement was prized — my late father insisted on good grades — but also instrumentalized. We got good grades so we could get a good job. That was the point of it. I see so clearly now, in my 55th year, that my dad had a strictly traditional idea of what his kids should be: 100 percent like him. If the point of education was to make us in any way different, then education was a menace.

My dad was like Clarence Williams in that he had high expectations for us kids, and would not accept slacking off in school or in our moral lives. Yet having a son who was temperamentally unlike him was unnerving. I’ve written about this at length in two earlier books, so I won’t go into it here in depth. The effect was that I grew up feeling like a phony, and that the things I really loved — books, ideas, movies, and not sports and hunting — made me inferior. It did in my dad’s eyes. He would have denied it till his dying day, but it really did.

I was lucky in that I had two aunts of ancient age who were part of my life in my first nine years. They were in our family, but boy, were they different from the rest of us. Lois and Hilda were born in the 1890s, and were living their final years in a shabby cabin in a pecan orchard walking distance from my family’s house, but they were two of the most cosmopolitan people I’ve ever known. They delighted little me with stories of being in France during the Great War, and later, of Lois living in Tegucigalpa with iguanas lounging on her lawn, and of Hilda dressing as a man to commandeer a relief boat to suffering communities during the 1927 flood. These women loved, loved, loved the life of the mind, and made me feel that I was made for it. Daddy always accused them of “ruining” me. So they did, I guess. But I say they saved me.

They died when I was young, about 10, and I had a miserable early teenage period, in which I was bullied at school, and … not bullied at home, but let’s just say that my father stayed mad at me, because he was sure that I was “different” to spite him. Fortunately, I was able to go off to a public boarding school when I was 16. It changed my life, chiefly because this was the first time I didn’t have to feel ashamed to be a smart kid who was interested in books and ideas. I had not realized that the world could be like this. I flourished. A lot of other kids there were like me in that way.

As you know if you’ve read me for any while, when my sister Ruthie died ten years ago, my wife and I felt a calling to move to small town Louisiana to help my family. Things did not work out. I falsely assumed that the family’s ethos had changed, but it hadn’t. They still thought of me as fake, as having gotten above myself, as having been disloyal to whatever it is they were and are. For example: that Paris trip in which Matt and I had the glorious experience in the Louvre? My father chastised me for wasting money taking the kids to do boring things. For the month we spent in Paris, we could have had two weeks in luxury at Disneyworld. My father would have congratulated me for being a good father if we had done that, but going off to Paris with the kids? No.

Thomas Chatterton Williams talks about “blackness” as the way of life he felt expected to live out (meaning not what his father taught him, but what the media and hip-hop culture told him was authentically black); I had a mild version of that in my family. It’s very small potatoes compared to what TCW went through, but when it’s your family you’re talking about, well, nothing looms larger in a person’s life. I saw no reason why I couldn’t love small-town Louisiana, where I had come from, but also love Paris and the rest of it — places I had learned in my adult life to love. In fact, there is no reason for that I couldn’t do this. Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda had done it! But my father, a highly intelligent man, bristled at anything unfamiliar. The word “different” was a word of opprobrium in my parents’ and sister’s vocabulary. As they saw it, the only reason I wasn’t like them 100 percent was because I was inauthentic, and deliberately so. That is, I had chosen to get above my raising. This was a rural Southern white-people way of telling me that I was fake. We don’t have a word like “Oreo” to describe people like me within white culture, but you get the idea.

I bring all this up again to tell you that Dante delivered me from the misery and the pain of realizing that I was always going to live in exile from my family, even if I lived just down the road. I tell the story in How Dante Can Save Your Life about how I got very sick with chronic mononucleosis, sparked by deep, unceasing anxiety over my rejection — and how discovering Dante by happenstance led me out of that dark wood. What I came to realize was that while my exile was permanent, and not something I could change, I could change the way I related to it, and thought about myself in relation to the exile. I learned reading Dante about mistakes I had made in my own life that left me vulnerable to the pain of this particular exile. I repented of those mistakes, and suddenly began to heal. I discovered that the most unlikely person — a 14th century itinerant Tuscan poet — had the secret to living with suffering. I found that Dante Alighieri knew me better than I knew myself.

And so, it wasn’t until I was 46 years old that I finally accepted that there was nothing wrong with me, or rather, what’s wrong with me has nothing to do with what my father and the others considered to be my faults. It wasn’t until I was 46 years old that I learned, in my heart, that God the Father is not like my own dad, and that I don’t have to live in the shadow of shame for disappointing Him. It might sound childish to you, but for me, my God, that was liberation. And it would not have happened if it hadn’t been for Dante.

My wife pointed out that Dante wouldn’t have come into my life had it not been for Homer, and for reading The Odyssey with my son Matt the year before. “Why were you in the poetry section of the bookstore that day you found Dante?” she asked. I couldn’t say; I didn’t care much for poetry back then, so didn’t visit it much. She told me: “Because you had read Homer, and it had rocked your world. You were there looking for something else that might.”

She was absolutely right.

I found myself in Dante, because I had first plunged into Homer, and saw what old books could do. Clarence Williams knew it long before I did. What a blessing it was for TCW to have grown up in the light of that great man’s gifts.

I didn’t mean to write so long, but man, this story got to me, this story of a father walking Athens with his little girl, going back to the roots of their civilization. Yes, their civilization. Even though both father and daughter have a significant amount of African blood, they are children of the West. Athens is their home, as is Rome, and Jerusalem. What a pity that so many of us today choose to be exiles, and teach our children that they have to hate themselves and where they come from in order to be authentic … and how many of us teach our children that they must love where they come from in exactly the way we love it, or they are inauthentic. It’s all there as a gift for the making of our own perspective!