The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

I hope I am as ready as the next person to suffer for the good of others, and if I knew for a fact that even 10 people this year, next year or a thousand years from now would like to know how one teaches a 4-year-old Greek I hope I would have the decency to explain it. As I don’t know this I think I will set this aside for the moment. L seems to be transferring Odyssey 5 word by word to pink file cards.

It made me nervous to have these rages and sardonic laughs just waiting to gallop off ventre à terre, it was easier not to say anything or to say something quiet and banal. And yet if someone is very clever and charming you would rather not say something banal, you resolve instead to say something while remaining perfectly calm & in control— I said that it seemed very quaint that in England books were in English & in France they were in French and that in 2,000 years this would seem as quaint as Munchkinland & the Emerald City, in the meantime it was strange that people from all over the world would go to one place to breed a nation of English writers & another to breed writers of Spanish, it was depressing in a literature to see all the languages fading into English which in America was the language of forgetfulness.

I said The Rosetta Stone. I think we need more. He said One’s not enough? I said What I mean is, though I believe the Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity. You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival. What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island. The great thing is that people who were put off Greek at school would then have another chance, I think they’re put off by the alphabet but if you’ve learned one at the age of six how hard can it be? It’s not a particularly difficult language.

Only the pen of Lord Leighton the writer could do justice to the brush of Lord Leighton the painter, for just so did Lord Leighton (the writer) bring the most agitated emotions to an airless to a hushed to an unhurried while each word took on because there was all the time in the world for each word to take on the bloom which only a great Master can give to a word using his time to allow all unseemly energy to become aware of its nakedness and snatch gratefully at the fig leaf provided until all passion in the airlessness in the hush in the absence of hurry sank decently down in the slow death of motion to perpetual stasis: a character could not look, or step, or speak, without a gorgeous train of sentences swathing his poor stupid thoughts and unfolding in beautiful languor on the still and breathless air.

I would have liked to cry into a pillow myself, and with a sore heart I began to read these words of comfort: §49. The Perfect and Imperfect with Waw Consecutive. 1. The use of the two tense-forms, as is shown more fully in the Syntax (§§106, 107, cf. above, §47, note on a), is by no means restricted to the expression of the past or future. One of the most striking peculiarities in the Hebrew consecution of tenses1 is the phenomenon that, in representing a series of past events, only the first verb stands in the perfect, and the narration is continued in the imperfect. Conversely, the representation of a series of future events begins with the imperfect, and is continued in the perfect. The author of the grammar discussed this marvellous grammatical feature with a kind of stiff scholarly charm, so that he would (for example) explain in a little footnote that ‘the other Semitic languages do not exhibit this peculiarity, excepting the Phoenician, the most closely related to Hebrew, and of course the Moabitish dialect of the Mêša ‘inscription’— just the three words ‘excepting the Phoenician’ were better than hours of the kind of help you can get on a helpline.

once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business.

What is the Alien asks a reader. The Alien is whatever you want to call the thing that finds specious reasons for cruelty and how do you expect me to finish with these constant interruptions.

I said Yes you can and I said Do you remember what θεῶν meant and he said Of gods, I said Right, well θεοῖς means to gods or by gods & do you remember what ἡρώων and ἀνδρῶν meant & he said Of heroes and of men & I said But there’s no separate word meaning ‘of’, is there, it’s all in the word so there must be a bit of the word that means ‘of’ & what do you think that would be & I don’t know about you but I am about ready for The hills are alive (A-a-a-ah).

L is up to Odyssey 17. This is so bad for him. Hundreds of people saying wonderful marvellous far too young what a genius. It seems to me that it is does not take miraculous intelligence to master the simple fact that ’Οδυσσε‡ς is Odysseus, if you go on to master 5,000 similar simple facts you have only shown that you are a miracle of obstinacy.

I did not want to be there when he woke up but it would be rude to leave without a word. On the other hand almost any note would be impossible to write. I could not say thank you for a lovely evening because you can’t. I could not say hope to see you again because what if he took this as encouragement to see me again? I could not say I had a horrible time and I hope I never see you again because you just can’t. If I tried to write a short note that said something without saying any of these things I would still be there five or six hours later when he woke up.

Then I had an idea. The thing to do, I thought, was to imply that we had had an interesting conversation which just happened to be interrupted by the fact that I had to leave (for some sort of appointment, for example). Instead of marking the close of the occasion the note should present itself as a further element of a conversation which was still in progress & only suspended. The note should appear to assume that Liberace was interested in things like the Rosetta Stone & should purport to answer a perceived scepticism as to the possibility of putting together such a thing in such a way as to be generally comprehensible, thus presenting itself as part of an ongoing discussion to be resumed at some unspecified later date. All I would have to do was write down a short passage of Greek, as if for this interested sceptic, with translation transliteration vocabulary and grammatical comments—taking pains, of course, to write the latter as if for the type of person who can’t get enough of things like the middle voice, dual number, aorist and tmesis. I am usually not very good at dealing with social dilemmas, but this seemed a stroke of genius. It would take about an hour (comparing favourably with the five-hour unwritable note), and the final tissue of false implication would practically guarantee (while avoiding gratuitous cruelty and yet not departing for one instant from the truth) that Liberace would never want to see me again.

In fact I could not help thinking how much easier life would be if I proceeded without further ado to a noncommittal Ciao, rather than struggling hungover and sleepless with grammatical detail.

When I was pregnant I kept thinking of appealing names such as Hasdrubal and Isambard Kingdom and Thelonius, and Rabindranath, and Darius Xerxes (Darius X.) and Amédée and Fabius Cunctator. Hasdrubal was the brother of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps with elephants in the 3rd century BC to wage war with Rome; Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a 19th-century British engineer of genius; Thelonius Monk was a jazz pianist of genius; Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath; Darius was a Persian king, as was Xerxes; Amédée is the first name of the narrator’s grandfather in A la recherche du temps perdu, and Fabius Cunctator was the Roman general who saved the Roman state from Hannibal by delaying. They all had names one should really not give to a child, and once he was born I had to think fast.

She said But how did you get him to do all that work and I explained about the five words and the Schwan Stabilo highlighter & she said Yes but there must be more to it than that, there must be more to it than that— so that I could not help thinking of things I would rather not think about, such as how hard it is to be nice and how hard it was going to be to be nice. She seemed to be really interested because now a Barking train came and went and still she was here. She said what she meant was for example she had studied Latin herself, well if you teach a child French the simple task could be a word whereas in an inflected language the grammar was so frightfully complicated surely beyond the grasp of a 4-year-old child. I said I thought small children liked matching things up, it was not that big a deal, I just explained that the words had to match and he could see that they matched, though of course it probably made more sense when he got used to the idea.

& I looked again at the coloured page and I said And DON’T YOU DARE colour in ANY OTHER BOOK without ASKING ME FIRST. That was all I said, & it was too much. A chittering Alien bursts from the breast to devour your child before your eyes. He looked down at the page, & I returned to my work and he returned to his work. I had tried to be patient and kind but this was not very nice.

Just think Ludo in 2065 people will probably consider it absolutely BARBARIC that a child should be condemned to work 12 years without pay in absolute economic subjection to the adults into whose keeping fate has consigned it and BARBARIC that people should be brought into the world into circumstances they did not choose and then COMPELLED to remain REGARDLESS and they will not know which is more surprising, the absolute SILENCE on these subjects at the present time or the absolute RUBBISH routinely published on the subject of marriage between members of the same sex in papers which PURPORT to Is Red Devlin my father? I asked. She said: I don’t want to talk about it.

How long did it take you to work out what everybody was saying? I said I didn’t know. I spent a whole day on one scene one day and after that it got easier. Well how many times did you watch this scene said Sib & I said I didn’t know, not that many, maybe 50

On Saturday I went back to the library again, and this time there was a piece in the Independent Magazine on the Galapagos. It talked about extinction and selection. There were lots of logical fallacies, and also some factual mistakes about dinosaurs, and he seemed to have misunderstood the selfish gene theory. Here was my chance! I wasn’t going to point out the logical errors, which might put his back up, and I decided not to say anything about the part where he mixed up DNA and RNA because I thought that would be too embarrassing, but I thought I could safely point out more abstruse errors of fact, and this would be the type of thing I could sign Steven aged 11. It was hard to know how simply I should put the selfish gene theory: since he hadn’t understood it I didn’t want to make the explanation complicated, but I thought it would sound obnoxious if I stuck to words of one syllable. I wrote the letter ten times trying to sound clever and not obnoxious. I could have printed it out on the word processor, but I thought my atrocious handwriting might be more appealing, so I wrote the final version out by hand. It took two days to write. I could have written it in 15 minutes if I hadn’t had to worry about sounding obnoxious. Still, as Sibylla would say, it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people.

Did I tell you I was reading Die Zeit? said Sib. I was reading Die Zeit and I came across this lovely line, Es regnete ununterbrochen. It rained uninterruptedly. It sounded so lovely in the German. Es regnete ununterbrochen. Es regnete ununterbrochen. I shall think of it whenever it rains.

Perhaps no one would back down who’d started such a thing. HC would never back down. He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He had been through the Iliad and Odyssey and each time he had come to a word he did not know he had looked it up in Liddell & Scott and written it down, and if there were five words in a line he had looked up five words and written them down before going on to a line in which there were four words he did not know, and at the age of 14 he had worked through Tacitus in this way and at the age of 20 he had read the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun and at 22 the Dream of the Red Chamber. Now he moved one finger a centimetre and then another, and then he moved the toe of his boot a centimetre and the toe of his other boot a centimetre.

don’t know what I expected but I was surprised by the shining wooden floors and thick rugs and stuffed sofas. An interesting form of the subjunctive is not something you can bring back as a trophy but still this was not what I had expected.

She had always been unconventional and she got the idea of going out to India just to see the place. At first her father refused his permission, but she turned down three or four offers of marriage and began taking a horse out and setting it at six-foot fences, and when she had broken an arm and a collarbone her father said he supposed he’d better let her go then, before one of the horses got hurt. She sailed to Bombay and it was not at all what she had expected. The Club defied description. So did the people. Also, it was rather hot. That is, she had expected it to be hot, but she had expected it to be cooler. But she looked up the rudest man she had ever met and this time they got on like a house on fire. She said that now that she had set foot in the country she could say whatever she liked and he said he was delighted to hear that she had overcome the diffidence which had afflicted her on a previous occasion. She said something rather cutting and he said something quite rude. She knew he was brilliant because her brother had said he was one of the most brilliant mathematicians he knew, but though he was brilliant and rude he was not condescending. Her brother’s other friends were unfailingly charming, so that she could not talk to one without instantly afterwards taking out a horse and setting it at a six-foot fence. She had never met a man who could open his mouth without imperilling the life of a horse.

One day he found a book on astronomy in the school library. Because he was interested in distance and the deaths of stars he turned first to a chapter on stellar evolution, and the book fell open on something called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which used brightness and temperature to plot the evolution of stars. Sorabji had never seen anything so wonderful in his life. He had never imagined that a piece of knowledge so wonderful could exist in the universe. He kept looking at the page thinking: Why have I never heard of this before? Why doesn’t everyone know about this? He sometimes said later how strange it was being at the school, knowing that no one had ever tried to give this glorious piece of information to the boys but instead forced them to spend hours turning perfectly good English poems into atrocious Latin ones. He said the frightening thing was thinking of how many other wonderful things there might be which were kept from them at the school. He had run away one last time and put himself in for A-levels independently and got the As and got into Cambridge, and he had never forgotten the things that were kept from people at school.

When I decided I was going to have to do it I realised I would have to be prepared. There was no point in going up to a Nobel Prize winner and saying the kind of thing that would make him think Sesame Street was about the right level. The problem was that it was hard to know what would be enough. Finally I decided to do Fourier analysis and Laplace transforms and Lagrangians and I would also learn the periodic table because I had been meaning to do it for a long time and I would also learn the Lyman, Balmer, Paschen and Brackett hydrogen series because of Sorabji’s early interest in spectroscopy and maybe that would be enough. It took about a month to get ready.

I started walking to his house. I was getting more and more nervous. What if I had the chance of having a perfect father and blew it because I forgot the mass numbers of the three most abundant isotopes of hafnium?

And if I’d just seen Sorabji on another night—if I’d just spent one more day on the periodic table—I wouldn’t have seen Dr. Miller, and I wouldn’t have heard any phone calls, and I wouldn’t have known there was anything to see or hear. I could have stopped wasting time and been the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Instead I was going to have to do everything myself. I had another look at the Kutta-Joukowski theorem. It wasn’t so much that I knew for a fact that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. It’s just that if you’re not going to win a Nobel Prize you might as well do something else worth doing with the time, such as going up the Amazon or down the Andes. If you can’t go down the Andes you might as well do something else worth doing, such as having a shot at a Nobel Prize. Whereas this was just stupid.

As I said before, I’d been scuba diving in the Bahamas on a holiday. This was different. You might think you would get the full effect better actually being in the water, and that might be true up to a point. But in the capsule you were inside a pocket of air. What it felt like was being in a pocket of blue light—light that was blue the way water is wet.

The boatman said later that though later you wanted to find words for it, at the time it was so beautiful that, or rather beautiful would be a word that you would use later but at the time it was so much bigger than that that it would have hurt to talk. He said that one thing he respected in Mr. Watkins was that he had seen just in the look in his eyes that he had seen how big it was and that it would hurt to talk. A lot of people would have had to make a joke or something, but we both knew it was too big for that and we both knew we knew it.

I was reading a book on solid state physics. Sibylla gave it to me for my birthday because it said inside the front cover that the extension of our understanding of the properties of solids at the microscopic level is one of the important achievements of physics this century and because she had found a damaged copy on sale for £2.99. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the bargain it looked, because the blurb went on to say: Dr. Rosenberg’s book requires only a fairly basic background in mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, and atomic physics along with relatively intuitive ideas in quantum physics. Sibylla thinks no one is put off by difficulty only by boredom and if something is interesting no one will care how hard it is; it is certainly an absorbing subject but to follow it you really need at least some kind of introductory materials on the above-mentioned subjects.

I went back to Knightsbridge and found a phone that took phonecards and called Sibylla. I said I was in Knightsbridge and needed to be there early in the morning so I thought I would just stay there but I did not want her to think I was being held hostage or sold into sexual bondage to a ring of paedophiles. Sibylla did not say anything for a very long time. I knew what she was thinking anyway. The silence stretched out, for my mother was debating inwardly the right of one rational being to exercise arbitrary authority over another rational being on the ground of seniority. Or rather she was not debating this, for she did not believe in such a right, but she was resisting the temptation to exercise such power sanctioned only by the custom of the day. At last she said: Well then I’ll see you tomorrow.

He said: When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you’d had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you’d have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply. He said: People who generalise about people are dismissed as superficial. It’s only when you’ve known large numbers of people that you can spot the unusual ones—when you look at each one as if you’d never seen one before, they all look alike.

He said I see it every day. It never goes away. These eyes have seen, that is they’ve been in the same room with, that is you’ve seen Lear, maybe, people flinch when Gloucester is blinded. What do you think it’s like to see the bloody socket where a thumb went? He was crying with the other eye. You’re not haunted by Lear, I mean it doesn’t come back to haunt you, whereas the real thing—you see it day after day after day. You think of something else again and again and again. It’s not the blood, it’s the fact that a human did that. He said You need something to set against it. When you’ve seen that much badness you need something to set against it—some dazzling glorious act of goodness—not to redeem your faith in humanity, whatever that might mean, but just to make you stop feeling sick.

He said You go into these situations as a journalist and you keep thinking you should stop reporting and just help. You have to be professional. You tell yourself you’re helping by letting people know what’s happening. Well, they know what’s happening but it doesn’t do any good. You try to get some people out before it’s too late and you run into a blank wall of officialdom, and nothing does any good. And then it’s not just that you’ve seen stupid thugs with another language and a foreign uniform commit atrocities, but someone pretty much like yourself say I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do. If you’re lucky the person says Well, I’ll write to the Minister. He said I don’t want to go on. If I’ve got 50 years ahead of seeing the eye and the leg and the girl and the rest and the best I can hope for is someone promising to write to the Minister I’d be better off if I were out of it now.

The friendliness was the horrible part, because he’d be hurt, genuinely hurt, when I wasn’t pleased to see him or took offence because he’d beat the shit out of me the day before. And now that I’m back that’s all I see. That horrible friendliness everywhere. All these people who simply don’t realise, it just doesn’t occur to them that He said That’s what I mean about the ordinariness. That’s why it’s not enough. It’s not enough to stand up to what’s there, but people go on smiling pleasantly

My mother, I said, called the Samaritans once and asked whether research had been done on thwarted suicides to find out whether they had spent the time after the incident happily. What did they say? They said they didn’t know. He grinned. I said Sibylla said He said Who? I said My mother. She said they should recruit people like Oscar Wilde, only there isn’t anyone like Oscar Wilde. If there were enough people like Oscar Wilde so that you could staff Samaritans with them, no one would want to commit suicide anyway—they would joke themselves out of a job. You could call and someone would say Do you smoke? And you’d say Yes. And they’d say Good. A man needs an occupation.

I said: What if a person called the Samaritans and they weren’t very helpful? What if a person kept doing the same thing day after day? What if a person kept riding the Circle Line around and around? What if there was a person who thought the world would be a better place if everyone who would enjoy seeing a Tamil syllabary had access to a Tamil syllabary? What if there was a person who kept changing the subject? What if there was a person who never listened to anything anybody ever said?