Not so recently, Allergic Girl (who’s new book, Allergic Girl: Adventures in Living Well With Food Allergies, is published 7 March), a “friend and colleague”—a description at which we have arrived after to-age and fro-age—, wrote an excellent post about her renewed interest in studying Hebrew. Sitting in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art discussing the subject with her, I had asked whether studying the language of her forebears filled her with “atavistic thrumming.”
I asked the question because it is a feeling I have had and continue to have when studying languages—in general but also, and more specifically and affectingly, when studying the languages of my forebears. I find that it is hard to study Latin and Italian and avoid being filled with a particular (though difficult to describe) sense of awe. There is some special feeling of connection—a non-specific gravity, “a buzzing and a ringing”—that I feel from the tips of my toes to the tips of my hair. I feel no particular increased capacity to study or understand the language, mind you. Studying languages is, for me, a labor of love in which the emphasis is on labor. Studying languages, I am often reminded of Justice Antonin Scalia’s quip in response to being asked whether he likes to write. The Justice (and Latinist), offering the ablative absolute for an answer, says, “I enjoy having written.”
All of which leads me to Susan Orleans’s book experiments on Twitter in which she has asked her fellow Twitterers to list the “#booksthatchangedmyworld” and then, “#booksthatchangekidsworlds.” (The results are posted on Free Range, the blog Ms Orlean writes for The New Yorker.)
Years ago, I went to a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition of ancient Persian and Syrian artifacts. It was extraordinary because among the most prominent artifacts were early samples of writing. And all the writing was lists. Lists of crops. Lists of prices. Lists of cities. Lists of dieties.
What if the ancient Persians had the hashtag.
