I would tell them that I was too busy studying, that doing a degree in a language that is not your own is bloody hard, especially literature, where, naturally, the chief focus of the subject is language and each language is its own river, with its own source and ecology and tides. I would tell them all this and repeat that it really is bloody hard work, because you have to find the spirit of another culture inside you and to do that a part of you has to die.
