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I wanted to know how it was going to turn out, like flipping ahead in a book. I didn’t even know what kind of story it was, or what kind of role I was supposed to be playing. Which of us was taking it more seriously? Didn’t that have to be me, because I was younger, and also because I was the girl? On the other hand, I thought that there was a way in which I was lighter than he was—that there was a serious heaviness about him that was foreign to me, and that I rejected.
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I won four pounds of cashews in a raffle. For a couple of days I skipped lunch and dinner and just ate cashews. Every night I read until four, then slept until the alarm went off at eight. After morning classes, I slept some more and then went to more classes. The days took on a lurid, nightmarish quality, like they were all part of some long unbroken thing, and even though it was disorienting and gave me a constant headache, it was also exhilarating, and I didn’t really want it to end or change.
At four o’clock one morning when I still couldn’t sleep, I got up and wrote Ivan a long email about how much I believed in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even though the Chomskians were so dismissive of Whorf and called him a fire prevention engineer.
It was during his work for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company that Whorf developed a deep mistrust of language, of its unseen structures, which seemed always to be causing fires. In one factory, he found two rooms with oil drums. In one room the drums were “full”; in the other, “empty.” Workers were less careful around the “empty” drums, which in fact contained gas vapors; there were more vapors in that room than in the one with the “full” drums, and workers would go in there and light cigarettes and burst into flames. What had started the fire? Wasn’t it the binaries that were built into our language? What if our language had a different concept of “empty,” or no concept of “empty”? What was an “empty” oil drum?
Having hit Send, I walked to the snow-covered river, sat on a bench, and ate cashews. The sky looked like a load of glowing grayish laundry that someone had washed with a red shirt.
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I began to feel that I was living two lives: one consisting of emails with Ivan, the other consisting of school. Once, a few hours after getting an email from him, I ran into Ivan on the street. I knew he had seen me, but he acted as if he hadn’t. He just kept walking and didn’t say anything.
Later I was walking to the gym with Svetlana and we passed a guy I knew from linguistics class. “Hey Selin, how’s it going,” he said. I paused to reply. Svetlana also had to stop walking, and so did the guy. None of us could go until I said something. But I thought and I thought, and couldn’t think of what to say. After what felt like hours, I just gave up and started walking again.
“What was that all about?” asked Svetlana. “Who was that?”
“Nothing. Nobody.”
“Why wouldn’t you talk to him?”
“I couldn’t think of an answer.”
Svetlana stared at me. “‘How’s it going’ isn’t a question. It’s not like he actually cares how it’s going.”
“I know,” I said miserably.
“I get that you despise convention, but you shouldn’t let it get to the point that you’re incapable of saying, ‘Fine, thanks,’ just because it isn’t an original, brilliant utterance. You can’t be unconventional in every aspect of life. People will get the wrong idea.”
I nodded. It was true that I wanted to be unconventional and say meaningful things. At the same time, I felt very strongly that the problem was bigger than that. Something basic about language had started to escape me.
I thought I could fix it by taking classes. I signed up for a seminar on the philosophy of language. The point of the seminar turned out to be to come up with a theory such that, if a Martian read it, the Martian would understand what it is that we know when we know a language.
To cover all the bases, I also signed up for a class on psycholinguistics, which had a prerequisite in neural networking. In addition to not having taken it, I also didn’t know what neural networking was. For some reason, this didn’t really bother me, or seem like a problem. The handsome Italian professor wore the most elegant suits I had ever seen, in the most subtle colors—gray with a hint of smoky blue so elusive that you had to keep looking to be sure you hadn’t imagined it. The class met on the tenth floor of the psychology building, most of which was devoted to an institute for bat study and smelled accordingly. It was total sensory discord to see the handsome professor in his elegant suits stepping out of the elevator into the hall of stinky bats.
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Ivan started writing emails about fate and freedom. He seemed really worried about the possibility that we might not have free will. Lucretius and quantum theory came into it. The way I felt—and at no time more than when I was looking at the green cursor on the black screen, trying to compose an email to Ivan—I had nothing but free will. The thought that it might be limited in some way made me feel only relief.
My friend/ex-math teacher Tomi, who has been teaching for 20 years, says he can tell for most kids what the rest of their life will look like. There are exceptions, like with Freud who could not analyze certain people. I am afraid to ask him about myself. On the other hand, I am on the boundary of being a scientist, and so far the only scientific explanation for free will is that it is an illusion. I don’t like that.
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