Babel

by R.F. Kuang

She’s not the slightest bit religious; I mean, she’s civilized—’ He whistled. ‘That’s a loaded word, Letty.’

All we to-night are dreaming, — To smile and sigh, to love and change: Oh, in our heart’s recesses, We dress in fancies quite as strange

Languages had to be lived to be understood,

On cloudless nights especially, Oxford was transformed, its streets clear, its stones silent, its spires and turrets promising riddles and adventures and a world of abstraction in which one could get lost forever.

the generosities of the university should not demand his constant, unswerving loyalty to the Crown and its colonial projects, and if it did, then that was a peculiar form of bondage he had never agreed to.

And Letty was still angry with all of them,

why are V and Ramy big mad when they wont even tell Letty?

banian

marling?

We’re all liberals, aren’t we? There should be no restrictions between those who have goods and those who want to purchase them. That’s justice.’ ‘A curious defence,’ said Ramy, ‘to justify a vice with virtue.’

They can’t get enough of the stuff. They’ll pay anything for it. And if I had my way, every man, woman, and child in this country would be puffing opium smoke until they couldn’t think straight.’

rejoinder.

equipoise’

It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

synecdoche

Disappointing. For all their talk of rights and dignity.’ ‘I think those principles only apply to those they find human.’

‘How are you all? You think they’ll give you anything more interesting to do?’ ‘Not likely.’ Victoire yawned. ‘We’re abandoned children. Mama and Papa are too busy wrecking economies to deal with us.’

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.

Diē,’ he said again. Then a laugh escaped his throat; hysterical, helpless, because it was so very funny, so apt that the romanization of father contained the same letters for death in English.

Robin’s eyes darted around the deck, searching for anything that might serve as an anchor – oars, wooden buckets, spare planks – damn it, why was everything on a ship designed to float?

The Analects of Confucius made the claim sìbùjíshé;* that even a four-horse chariot could not catch a word once uttered, that the spoken word was irrevocable.

He couldn’t remember acting at all. Could you intend a murder if you couldn’t remember wanting it?

What was the blasted point of sorting through whether he’d desired his father’s death or not, when his ruined corpse was incontrovertibly, irreversibly sinking to the bottom of the ocean?

Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire’s and Ramy’s faces that they thought so too. It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

words would have worth and value because they were uttered, when they would not have to hide who they were, when they wouldn’t have to go through endless distortions just to be understood.

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical.

physical pain would mean he was alive, and because being alive meant that he had to move forward. But he could not go on. Not from this.

It seemed to defy the laws of physics that Ramiz Rafi Mirza could be silenced by something so tiny as a bullet.

He hoped. He hoped until hope became its own form of torture. The original meaning of hope was ‘to desire’, and Robin wanted with every ounce of his being a world that no longer was. He hoped until he thought he was going mad, until he started hearing fragments of his thoughts as if spoken outside of him, low, gruff words that echoed around the stone.

denigrates

Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them?

Not again; not thrice; how many times was he doomed to bend over a dying body, watching a life slip away, helpless to snatch it back?

The lights that shone through arched windows still promised warmth, old books, and hot tea within; still suggested an idyllic scholar’s life,

where ideas were abstract entertainments that could be bandied about without consequences.

It was only an idea, a wish more than anything, but it was a beginning. And it took root and grew inside them, unfurled until it became less a ludicrous fantasy and more a question of logistics, of how and when.

theoretical rights like freedom and liberty would be debated between those who already enjoyed them, stale concepts that, upon their readers’ graduation ceremonies, would promptly be forgotten.

Her formidable mind retained information like a steel trap. She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges. She approached language with a determined, mathematical rigour, and she broke down the thorniest of Latin constructions through sheer force of will.

Time and time again she found her ethics questioned, and she reiterated her positions, as if proving she was not indeed a bad person.

she had at least to save herself.

weird wording

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.

For Oxford’s scholars were sheltered and coddled, armchair theorists who wrote of blood-stained battlefields with smooth and delicate hands.

If its the only bridge then it can’t be the one that sees the most traffic. It’s the ONLY bridge to receive traffic. Wtf.

Can you imagine keeping track off all that in the air and visualize it>? Wtf no

Content error, the ENTIRE GODDAMN NEWSPAPER CLIPPING IS MISSING FROM THE DIGITAL VERSION.

They were no longer a cohort. Now they were only a wake.

BUT ONLY, THEY DO! THEY KNOW SHE’S BEEN ACTING AND DOUBLE-CROSSED THEM SO WHICH IS IT !?

SHE LITERALLY JUST SAID THEY’D WIN A BODILESS WAR. FUCK THIS

If they said too little, they would regret it forever. If they said too much, they’d never bring themselves to part.

how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

3. Plans for the theft and subsequent return to Egypt of the Rosetta Stone.