We learned about the different ways Noam Chomsky was right and B. F. Skinner was wrong. Skinner overestimated how close humans were to animals, and then he underestimated the animals. The man didn’t understand birdsong.
We learned that, because language was a universal human instinct, no human was bad at grammar—not even toddlers or black people. That’s what the book said: you might think that toddlers and black people had no grammar, but if you analyzed their utterances, they were actually following grammatical rules so sophisticated that they couldn’t be programmed into any computer.
We learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which said that the language you spoke affected how you processed reality. We learned that it was wrong. Whorf, a fire inspector—they always called him a fire inspector—believed that Hopi people perceived time differently than we did, because their verbs didn’t have tenses. He said Hopis didn’t see two days as two different things, but rather as one thing that happened twice. It turned out he was somehow wrong about that—about the Hopis.
The Chomskians viewed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the vilest slander—not just incorrect, but hateful, like saying that different races had different IQs. Because all languages were equally complex and identically expressive of reality, differences in grammar couldn’t possibly correspond to different ways of thinking. “Thought and language are not the sssame thing,” the professor said, whistling faintly, which he did only at emotional moments. He said the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was inconsistent with “the tip of the tongue syndrome.” They really called it a syndrome. It was when a word was on the tip of your tongue.
In my heart, I knew that Whorf was right. I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -mi?, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.
The suffix -mi? had no exact English equivalent. It could be translated as “it seems” or “I heard” or “apparently.” I associated it with Dilek, my cousin on my father’s side—tiny, skinny, dark-complexioned Dilek, who was my age but so much smaller. “You complained-mi? to your mother,” Dilek would tell me in her quiet, precise voice. “The dog scared-mi? you.” “You told-mi? your parents that if Aunt Hülya came to America, she could live in your garage.” When you heard -mi?, you knew that you had been invoked in your absence—not just you but your hypocrisy, cowardice, and lack of generosity. Every time I heard it, I felt caught out. I was scared of the dogs. I did complain to my mother, often. The -mi? tense was one of the things I complained to my mother about. My mother thought it was funny.
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In Russian class we learned the verb “to like” and talked about what kind of films we liked. I said I liked documentaries. Varvara seemed skeptical. “You don’t find them boring?”
I looked at the table. Was it so obvious?
Ivan said he liked movies by Fellini. Varvara said that then he liked Italian films. I didn’t know anything about Fellini; my mental image was of a human-sized cat.
The Harvard Film Archive had a Fellini retrospective. I decided to go, because Fellini was also on Gary’s syllabus. It seemed weird that Gary and Ivan had the same favorite director. Gary’s favorite movie was La Dolce Vita, and Ivan’s was La Strada. Svetlana came with me to La Dolce Vita. “You talk of nothing but the kitchen and the bedroom!” Marcello Mastroianni shouted at his fiancée. He rejected her maternal, smothering love, preferring to meet glamorous foreign women at parties. In La Strada, there were no parties, and no one was glamorous. Giulietta Masina was in love with the strongman. The strongman told her that she was less like a woman than like an artichoke.
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Svetlana took private French lessons from a grad student named Anouk. Every week, she wrote an essay about love, in French, and emailed it to Anouk, and they would meet at the Café Gato Rojo to discuss it together. Svetlana often recounted her essay to me when we were running together. Svetlana had no difficulty talking and running at the same time; she seemed able to keep it up indefinitely.
“For today,” she was saying, “I wrote about how you can make absolutely anybody fall in love with you if you really try.”
“But that’s just not true,” I said.
“Why not?”
“How could I make a Zulu chief fall in love with me?”
“Well, of course you would need geographic and linguistic access, Selin.” We were jogging side by side along Oxford Street. I briefly dropped behind to let by a woman with a stroller. Svetlana had written about whether love was a game you could get infinitely good at, like in French novels—whether it was a matter of playing your cards right—or whether it existed between certain people in some kind of current and you just had to tap into it.
“So you think it’s about playing your cards right?” I said.
“Pretty depressing, huh? Sometimes I think there could be two kinds of love. There could be one rare kind that just naturally exists between certain people. Then there’s the more common kind that’s constructed.”
It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too. It was just like Chekhov said, in “The Darling”:
She saw objects round her and understood everything that was going on, but she could not form opinions about anything and did not know what to talk about. How awful it is not to have an opinion! You see a bottle, for example, standing there, or the rain falling, or a peasant going along in his cart, but what the bottle or rain or peasant are for, what sense they make, you can’t say and couldn’t say, even if they offered you a thousand rubles.
Every now and then, a book had something like that in it, and it was some comfort. But it wasn’t quite the same thing as having an opinion.
We rounded the T station in Porter Square. Below us, on the other side of a chain-link fence, train tracks and wet gravel gleamed under pink lights. There was a DUNKIN’ DONUTS sign and a big clock. Someone somewhere was asking for money.
“Is it okay if I ask you a personal question?” asked Svetlana.
“Okay,” I said.
“Are you dating someone now?”
“No.”
“So who’s the guy I always see you with? You know who I mean. Your height, brown hair, clean-cut, very American.”
“Oh, Ralph. We’re friends from high school.”
“I couldn’t tell from your body language—first I thought you were involved, then I thought you weren’t. Did you used to go out or something?”
“No.”