National Hellenic Museum Gala
The Greek poet Hesiod, writing in the 7th century B.C.E., has a warning about late summer. Hesiod tells us that we must not be lulled into complacency by the warm weather and gentle winds of the season, but reminds us to, “exert yourself to get home as quickly as possible,/and do not wait for the time of the new wine and autumn rains,/and the approaching bad weather…” (Works and Days, 673-5).
Everywhere around us it would seem people are heeding Hesiod’s warning, as we head back from vacation and send children back to school. The freedom of summer is ending and the familiar rhythms of ordinary life are returning. In all these homecomings, it is difficult not to be seized by a certain mood of nostalgia, as we remember other summer’s ends, other back-to-school seasons, other departures from lake houses in Michigan and villages in Greece.
It is easy to think that all this remembering is about the past, the past we have lost and can never hope to return to. A past that somehow seems infinitely better than the future. But this does not strike me as entirely true. I have come to believe that we remember the past precisely because the future, with all its uncertainty and promise, is coming. In the past we find hope that our future will turn out alright in the end, just as it did for those who came before us. We are reminded, as Hesiod would have us remember, that we must not allow a bit of sunny weather and good sailing keep us from getting to the task at hand, because it is when we stop moving that the bad weather catches us.
Next month, on Saturday, September 28, the National Hellenic Museum will celebrate our 2024 Gala at the Chicago Hilton. The Gala supports the National Hellenic Museum’s mission to share
Greek history, art, culture, and the Greek American story. But it would be an error to think the Gala–or the work of the National Hellenic Museum– is about the past. Both are very much about the future and the knowledge that the past and the future are connected to each other by the unbroken chain of every human life.
You can learn more about tickets and sponsorships for the National Hellenic Museum Gala here.
Think of it as one more late summer homecoming.
