Last Night in Montreal

by Emily St. John Mandel

They’re artists because they issue statements saying they’re artists, not because of anything they actually do or produce, and that’s really where my problem begins.

every language on earth contains at least one crucial concept that cannot be translated.

There aren’t three thousand words for everything; the speakers of Yupik have no reason to describe tigers in the High Arctic; the speakers of the jungle languages need no words for the northern lights. It isn’t even so much about the words. His belief was that these are not just languages we lose in the gloaming, not just three thousand sets of every word, but three thousand ways of existing on this earth.

Or the Australian Guugu Yimithir, a language of ferociously absolute positioning, in which there was no way to tell someone, for instance, that Lilia is standing to your left; you’d have to say, instead, “Lilia is standing to the west of me.” In that language there are no variables, only north, south, east, west. If that were the only language you had ever known, would it be possible to think in relative terms, in terms of variables, directionlessness, things that are changeable and a little delirious rather than certain, mirages, shades of grey?