The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.

I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said “you can feel the food.” That was how Owen would end up with students who said “savor,” while I would end up with students who said “papel iss blonk.”

notebook. I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back. I

She asked my age. Something flickered across her face. “I’m twenty-six,” she said, as if it were bad news she had received only recently. “It isn’t the age I feel like.” “What age do you feel like?” “Nineteen—like you.” But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year—maybe as many as seven years—to learn to feel nineteen.