Tag: Language

Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.

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“In the dream, a man had cut down our fifty-year-old pistachio tree, Leila’s and my tree. In the dream, we had a pistachio tree. Fifty years old. That alone.

And so we were deciding what to do with this man, what his just punishment should be. I said something stupid about him owing us a year’s pistachio harvest, the cost of the tree. And then Leila said, in English:

“I do not care about the pistachios, Roya jaan. I do not care about the tree. He owes us the fifty years of sun, fifty years of water inside that tree. Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.”

She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.”

— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)

Notes:

  1. This man can write! Highly recommended.
  2. Amazon January, 2024 Book of the Month
  3. Book Review by Junot Diaz, NY Times, January 19, 2024: “A Death-Haunted First Novel Incandescent With Life. In “Martyr!,” the poet Kaveh Akbar turns a grieving young man’s search for meaning into a piercing family saga.
  4. Portrait Credit

Miracle. All of It.

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 Human beings are creations more profound than human beings can fathom…

That’s one of the proofs of God…

there’s no other explanation.

~ Niall Williams, “This Is Happiness” (Bloomsbury Publishing; December 3, 2019)

Notes:

  • Art.  Finger painter (by default). Artist Mary Jane Q Cross (New Hampshire) with “Breath of Heaven” (via Mennyfox55)
  • Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Miracle. All of It.

Live & Learn34 Comments

“There is a beauty in falling in love with a language—the strangeness of its sounds, the awe of watching the sea-surf of a new syntax beating again and again the cement of your unknowing. Learning to speak again can be erotic—the unfamiliar turn of the tongue, the angle of the mouth, the movement of lips.”

~ Ilya Kaminsky, from an interview conducted by Edward Clifford in the Massachusetts Review titled “(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Ilya Kaminsky”

Notes:

  • Quote via Violent Waves of Emotion. Photo: Biancaa.R with mouth.
  • Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

About right.

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Is this verbal violence, then, simply incompetence? Is it the verbal equivalent of someone who has not learned the piano sitting down and trying to play Rachmaninov’s Third? The rudeness of these public figures gives pleasure and relief, it is clear, to their audiences. Perhaps what they experience is not the possibility of actual violence but a sort of intellectual unbuttoning, a freedom from the constraint of language. Perhaps they have lived lives in which they have been continually outplayed in the field of articulation, but of this new skill – rudeness – they find that they are the masters.

~ Rachel Cusk, from “On Rudeness” in Coventry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux. September 16, 2019)

Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly

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We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself. We can and do make small and tedious lives as we sail through the cosmos on our uncannily lovely little planet, and this is surely remarkable. But we do so much else besides. For example, we make language. A language is a grand collaboration, a collective art form which we begin to master as babes and sucklings, and which we preserve, modify, cull, enlarge as we pass through our lives. Some students in France drew my attention to the enormous number of English words that describe the behavior of light. Glimmer, glitter, glister, glisten, gleam, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine, and so on. These old words are not utilitarian. They reflect an aesthetic attention to experience that has made, and allows us to make, pleasing distinctions among, say, a candle flame, the sun at its zenith, and the refraction of light by a drop of rain. How were these words coined and retained, and how have they been preserved through generations, so that English-speaking people use them with the precision necessary to preserving them? None of this can be ascribed to conscious choice on the part of anyone, but somehow the language created, so to speak, a prism through which light passes, by means of which its qualities are arrayed. One of the pleasures of writing is that so often I know that there is in fact a word that is perfect for the use I want to put it to, and when I summon it it comes, though I might not have thought of it for years. And then I think, somewhere someone was the first person to use that word. Then how did it make its way into the language, and how did it retain the specificity that makes it perfect for this present use?

~ Marilynne Robinson, from “Imagination and Community” in When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays

Notes:

  • Photo: Miriam Mannak with Flame. Quote: via a thing in motion
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”