So much more alive
“Sometimes he spoke aloud, but it was not satisfying; it seemed rather to hold back the natural development of the ideas. They flowed out through his mouth, and he was never sure whether they had been resolved in the right words. Words were so much more alive and more difficult to handle, now; so much so that Kit did not seem to understand them when he used them. They slipped into his head like the wind blowing into a room, and extinguished the frail flame of an idea forming there in the dark. Less and less he used them in his thinking. The process became more mobile; he followed the course of thoughts because he was tied on behind. […] It was an existence of exile from the world. He never saw a human face or figure, nor even an animal; there were no familiar objects along the way, there was no ground below, nor sky above, yet the space was full of things. Sometimes he saw them, knowing at the same time that really they could only be heard. Sometimes they were absolutely still, like the printed page and he was conscious of their terrible invisible motion underneath, and of its portent to him because he was alone. Sometimes he could touch them with his fingers and at the same time they poured in through his mouth. It was all utterly familiar and wholly horrible—existence unmodifiable, not to be questioned, that must be borne.”
—“The Sheltering Sky”, Paul Bowles
This passage describes the hallucinations of one character as he dies of cholera alone in the Maghreb. It is also not a bad account of the way I feel every day I spend abroad.
To live in a place and speak its language with imprecision is to attach a margin of error to every idea one wishes to express. Before I came to Turkey, I gave short shrift to the idea that humans construct much of the world around them. But in my life here, what once were facts (or seemed to be!) are now confidence intervals, objects whose truth varies with the probability that I have comprehended them. Likewise, when words flow out from my mouth in the stilted Turkish of a toddler, I am never sure that they are resolved.
Consider how much of the world is built on language. The simple act of expressing thoughts to others is most obvious, but there is so much more. In English, my mind sifts through a constant backround chatter: the conversations of people around me, the words I read from street signs and advertisements. In Turkish, it’s as if I’ve pressed the mute button—or at least turned the volume so far down that I must strain to truly hear and work hard to comprehend.
In many ways, it is “an existence of exile from the world,” life in a place “full of things” but devoid of “familiar objects.” This is a hard, bleak place to inhabit, “utterly familiar and wholly horrible,” but I tell myself every day that it is better than snapping a few photos of the Hagia Sophia and flying home.
