Old Latin sayings make me sound smart!

“Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare current”
“They change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean”
-Horace

Look at me, all intellectual and stuff quoting some dead guy in Latin! I came across this quotation while eating pizza with far to little sauce at a little place in Butha-Buthe in Lesotho. For obvious reasons this quotation appealed to me. I have since been trying to determine the truth of it. While on the one hand I can say the sky has changed (the stars at night are something you should behold. The constellations are all wrong, the moon upside down! The milky way a bright belt across the bulging sky!) I wonder about the second half of that, the consistency of the soul. At the risk of getting to “existential” I’d like to give you some insight into my unchanged (or changed?) soul.

I am, at the heart of it, inclined to agree with Horace. On the one hand I can say without a doubt that I have changed. I have grown in ways I never thought I would (in just 4 months!) and I have learned things I would have otherwise never known. These changes and growths, however profound, have done little to change my core beliefs. Infact, I can say now that I believe more strongly in my world view. The hopeless idealist, in the face of stark reality, has nowhere else to turn but inward, back to the idealism that drove him to reality. At the core, my morals and values are the same. I still, despite the idiocy I see, the selfishness that America can only HOPE to achieve, the single minded attitudes that are so harmful, believe that every person is, at the core good. My sky is different, for sure, but my soul, for better or worse, will never change.

One thing I will never forgive is pizza without sauce. Who taught them how to make pizza? Who would be so reckless and unforgiving!?!