More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall. ANTONIO DE NEBRIJA, Gramática de la lengua castellana
Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.
The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.
He had no fire left in him. He was only scared, and so very tired.
Robin did not yet fully understand the rules of this world he was about to enter, but he understood the necessity of gratitude. Of deference. One did not spite one’s saviours.
He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive.
‘But I know English.’ ‘Not as well as you think you do. Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do.
there were some truths that could not be uttered, that life as normal was only possible if they were never acknowledged.
A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers.
it was difficult to disdain a man who so clearly adored the accumulation of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire.’
Then he blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them.
Yet didn’t he have a right to be happy? He had never felt such warmth in his chest until now, had never looked forward to getting up in the morning as he did now.
But what is meaning? Does meaning refer to something that supersedes the words we use to describe our world?
words are connected to the concepts they describe by something invisible, intangible – a mystical realm of meaning and ideas, emanating from a pure mental energy which only takes form when we ascribe it an imperfect signifier.’
‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’
‘We get the word etymology from the Greek étymon,’ continued Professor Lovell. ‘The true sense of a word, from étumos, the “true or actual”. So we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’
‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.’
if something did not suit them, they simply failed to acknowledge it, and indeed any attempt to procure acknowledgment would only end in more frustration.
It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.
‘You have such a great fear of freedom, brother. It’s shackling you. You’ve identified so hard with the colonizer, you think any threat to them is a threat to you.
If only one could engrave entire memories in silver, thought Robin, to be manifested again and again for years to come – not the cruel distortion of the daguerreotype, but a pure and impossible distillation of emotions and sensations. For simple ink on paper was not enough to describe this golden afternoon;
‘Sometimes rare and expensive things are worse.’
‘She looks like starlight,’
‘Ibasho,’ she repeated, swaying. Her arms floated in front of her, either dancing or conducting the music, he couldn’t tell which. For that matter, he couldn’t tell where the music was coming from at all. ‘It doesn’t translate well into English. It means “whereabouts”. A place where one feels like home, where they feel like themselves.’
Languages had to be lived to be understood,
Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.
The room seemed at once both mundane and heartbreakingly beautiful: the morning light streaming through stained-glass windows, casting colourful patterns on the polished wooden desks; the clean scratch of chalk against the blackboard; and the sweet, woody smell of old books.
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.
Behaving like a person demanded tremendous focus.
The four of them took turns losing their minds. There was an unspoken rule to this game: one of them was allowed to break down at a time, but not all of them at once, for the duty of the saner heads was to talk the mad one down.
‘But if the system is so fragile, why do we so easily accept the colonial situation? Why do we think it’s inevitable? Why doesn’t Man Friday ever get himself a rifle, or slit Robinson Crusoe’s neck in the night? The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun.’
Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them?
She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges.
‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’
‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’
How could you love someone who had hurt you so badly?
But what struck him most just then was the beauty. The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For 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.
...more
‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’ ‘Me too,’ Ramy said. ‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ ‘Because you’re fascinating.’ ‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is.
...more
There will come many nights on the voyage when the sadness is so great it threatens to tear her apart; when she regrets her decision to live; when she curses Robin for placing this burden on her, because he was right: he was not being brave, he was not choosing sacrifice. Death is seductive. Victoire resists.
