On Vocabulary

“Can I say ‘annoying’?” That’s the question my daughter has been asking me of late, as she explores the boundaries of the new vocabulary she is learning. “Yes, you can say ‘annoying,'” I reply. “Can I say ‘shut up’?” she asks. “No, you can’t say ‘shut up.'” “And I can’t say ‘shit’,” she states matter-of-factly. That’s right, she already knows she can’t say ‘shit’ but she still gets a tremendous kick from just quickly confirming that fact with me because to do so, of course, means getting to say ‘shit’ all over again without fear of punishment. It’s like the joke my son told me the other day, warning me ahead of time that it contained a curse: A 6-year-old boy was scolded by his parents for still talking like a baby. ‘Why don’t you use more grown-up words,’ they said. So the next day, when he got home from school, his parents asked him what he had done in class and he said: ‘We read a book called Winnie the Shit.’

Words have an awesome power, and there’s no clearer example of that than when children deploy new vocabulary to see what effect their words have on the world. My daughter, for example, wields the word ‘annoying’ all the time now, using it to describe anything and everything that elicits her displeasure. My son, who’s eight, enjoys using mild curse words in safe contexts, like in a joke. He hears other kids using them for real in the schoolyard and can see the mixture of shock and admiration their use evokes in other children. My kids are learning that words are not just airy nothings; they have a very real and dramatic impact on the world—they can make other people laugh or cry, they can help get you what you want, they can get you into or out of a lot of trouble, too.

Adults are usually unconscious of the latent power of language, but you can feel it in full force again when learning a foreign tongue. One of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s best aphorisms is:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

I felt my linguistic limits extended when I learned Dutch about 17 years ago. Each language has words in it that don’t exist in any other tongue, and one of the greatest joys of speaking another language is stretching your mind to encompass this new vocabulary. Gezellig is a word like that in Dutch. It has so many nuanced meanings that it’s impossible to find a simple English equivalent. Indeed, there is no single English equivalent since gezellig is a word that expresses a distinctly Dutch state of mind. It means different things in different circumstances. An evening with friends can be gezellig, meaning friendly and intimate and fun. But inanimate objects can also be gezellig, like a room with a roaring fire in the fireplace, meaning cozy and inviting. But an individual can also be gezellig, meaning that he or she is warm and welcoming. It was not until I learned Dutch, and came to understand the meaning of this word, that I was able to recognize the quality of gezelligheid when I saw it. This not only added a new word to my vocabulary; it added a new experience to my world.

And so it is with my daughter. At almost four years old, she is intrepidly exploring the world of words, experimenting with language to see which words cause happiness, which words cause pain, which words make people laugh, which words make them cry. By trying out words like ‘annoying’, ‘shut up’ and ‘shit’ on me, she’s testing to see if they cause the desired effect. This is something we never stop doing. What American poet John Hall Wheelock wrote is just as true of adults as it is for children:

A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows.

On Chopping Wood

I can see why President Bush likes it. Although, technically speaking, he’s into “clearing brush”. And he uses power tools, which disqualifies him. Chopping wood is one of those primal activities that directly meets a basic need, and consequently provides a primal kind of satisfaction. These days we usually meet our basic needs at one or two removes. Few of us grow or kill our own food anymore, for example, even fewer make our own clothes, and fewer still build our own houses. But almost anyone can chop wood, thereby providing fuel to keep yourself and your family warm. It’s an ancient chore, provided you use and ax and not a chain saw, and is very conducive to contemplating the bare necessities of life.

The first thing you need, of course, is an ax. I had only an old one, the wooden shaft worn smooth with age and the head flecked with rust. This ax clearly hadn’t been cleaving any timber recently. I ran my thumb along the edge and it felt about as sharp as a butter knife. This just wouldn’t cut it, I thought. I don’t chop wood every day, so initially thought I should have the ax sharpened first. But a friend, with more experience than I, took a few whacks to show me that it would do just fine. With a few fell swoops, the logs split open with a crack. Often the best preparation for a task is just doing it. Use sharpens a dull ax. So I launched into the logs with gusto, letting the chips fall where they may.After a while, chopping wood becomes a meditation. You’re still paying attention to what you’re doing (you’d better be anyway), but your mind also wanders into a placid place where all kinds of thoughts bob up, bounce around on the surface for a bit and then vanish. It’s satisfying on both a physical and psychological level. I enjoyed inflicting violence on those logs, hoisting the ax above my head and bringing it down with as much force as I could muster. And it was very rewarding to hear the logs burst open with a sound like a gunshot. My enjoyment was enhanced by knowing it was all for a good cause (i.e. building a fire that night). I also enjoyed following where my mind roamed. It’s sort of like walking a dog: you keep the dog on the leash, restricting its movements, until you get to the park, where you let him loose to run wherever he wants to. It was a pleasure to let my mind off the leash while chopping, and to follow it at a leisurely place. I thought of the aphorisms of Jesus, the ones found in the gnostic gospels rather than the New Testament, and one aphorism in particular that has always haunted me:

I am the light that is over all things. I am all: From me all has come forth, and to me all has reached. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.

When I was finished, I was sweaty, tired and satisfied. Then I started neatly piling the logs up in a stack. You’re not finished anything until you’ve cleaned up the mess you’ve made. Seeing the logs all stacked up against the wall gave me the same kind of satisfaction as contemplating a well-stocked wine cellar: the bottles look very attractive in their tidy rows, but you know you’re going to have even more fun drinking them. We now had more than enough logs to keep us warm for a good long while. It’s probably the only time I was really happy to see all my hard work go up in smoke.

On Watching A Group of Snails Cross the Sidewalk

There must have been about a dozen of them, each making its own slow, stately progress across the sidewalk, antennae probing the air in slow motion, pinwheeling like the limbs of a cartoon character that’s just walked off the edge of a cliff, waving around like the tentacles of a sea anemone. They formed an elegant regatta; instead of sails, each hoisted its own carapace, navigating this dangerous crossing by touch. They were difficult to see, though, their shells blending so completely into the color of the concrete. I thought of the Allied convoys that ferried supplies across the Atlantic during World War II. Of the scores of ships that set out, up to half were routinely picked off by German U-boats. How many snails would make it to their destination: the brick wall on the other side of the sidewalk, behind which lay a neighbor’s front garden and safety?

The sidewalks are thick with snails this time of year, but I had never before seen so many travelling in a pack or a herd or a bevvy, or whatever the technical term is for a group of snails. Everything about them reminded me of ships. They bobbed up and down slightly as they sailed along, their bodies moving in a wave-like motion, the slimy foot on which they glide rippling like the surface of the ocean. And they even left a wake, thin strips of mucous just like the ones I see glistening in our garden every morning, tracing the paths where the snails have been. They were so calm, so determined, so oblivious to the danger they were in from pedestrians. I thought of putting up a road sign, CAUTION: SNAIL CROSSING. By the way, May 24 is National Escargot Day.About 45 minutes later, I was coming back the same way and stopped to see how the snails had fared. Of the 12 that originally set out, eight made it to the garden. I saw one still making the final ascent of the brick wall on the other side of the sidewalk. I counted four oily, snot-like clumps and four crushed shells. Not a bad success rate, I thought, for such a perilous trek.

I don’t know any aphorisms about snails, but I do know a few aphorisms about persistence, and that’s what impressed me most about these snails. They risked everything to get to the other side. To me, their progress looked plodding. But for the snails it was a race against death. And they took their time, taking the perils and the possibilities in stride. Like Baltasar Gracián, a 17th century Spanish Jesuit monk, said:

Be slow and sure. Things are done quickly enough if done well. If just quickly done they can be quickly undone. To last an eternity requires an eternity of preparation.

On Climbing La Lance, II

I am reading The Note-Books of Samuel Butler at the moment. Butler was an English novelist, painter, early convert and then opponent of Darwinism, sheep farmer and aphorist, and his Note-Books have been one of those rare reading experienes in which I find things I’ve been thinking about already beautifully and perfectly expressed. Sometimes, a book arrives in your life at exactly the right moment, when your mental and/or emotional path seems to completely overlap with the author’s. Butler’s has been just such a book for me. Often, the correspondances are startling, as in this passage, which I read yesterday, after posting On Climbing La Lance: “Everything that is worth attending to fatigues as well as delights, much as the climbing of a mountain does so. Chapters and short pieces give rests during which the attention gathers renewed strength and attacks with fresh ardour a new stretch of the ascent.”

That’s exactly how I feel about climbing mountains, and about surmounting supposedly insurmountable obstacles. It’s also a brilliant explanation for why aphorisms are short (see my first law of aphorisms). And it reminds me of a somewhat overwrought aphorism about aphorisms and mountains by Nietzsche, who was an avid mountain climber:

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks—and those who are addressed tall and lofty.

Which leads me to another paradox about climbing mountains: during the descent, there is far more opportunity to look up than during the ascent. We didn’t quite make it all the way to the top of La Lance. That would have taken another two hours or so of strenuous walking. Our goal was the old farmhouse in the pasture, and when we reached it we sat down in the grass to enjoy the view. Naturally enough, heading back down the mountain was a stroll in the park compared to climbing up it in the first place. On the way down, I passed various landmarks I first noticed on the way up, like that fossil ammonite. But I also revisited spots where I had stopped to rest, places where I plopped my sweaty, exhausted self down on a rock during the climb and thought: ‘I’m never gonna make this. I’ll just wait here til the rest come back down.’

These little moments of weakness, crises of confidence are all part of the climb. But walking past those spots again during the descent, I was in a much better position (and state of mind) to notice my surroundings. More often than not, the places where I sat with my head in my hands contemplating my aching feet offered astoundingly scenic views, panoramas I didn’t notice at the time because I was looking (and feeling) down. It put me in mind of another mountain-related aphorism, again by a Dutchman, Multatuli, psuedonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker:

A standpoint reached as the result of an ascent has a different meaning from that same standpoint reached as a result of a fall.

Like Butler’s remark, it’s worth keeping in mind when climbing mountains, surmounting (or failing to surmount) insurmountable obstacles, and suffering the fatigue and delight that comes from attending to whatever is worth attending to.

On Climbing La Lance

I have to admit that I’m not much of a mountain climber, or even a pleasure walker. Which is strange, because I’m normally very much into “goal-directed activities.” One of the reasons I used to dislike taking walks, or at least the excuse I frequently cited for not taking part in them, was that I didn’t see the point. You’re not actually going anywhere when you take a walk, you’re just taking a walk. That’s not a goal-directed activity, you see, so I wasn’t interested. (I have been woefully wrong about taking walks for years now–walks do have goals, often extremely worthwhile ones, like conviviality–and goal-directed activities are way over-rated anyway, but more on that in a separate posting.) Climbing a mountain is fundamentally different from taking a walk in that there is a very clear goal from the outset: getting to the top. I have my wife to thank for finally convincing and cojoling me into getting to the top of La Lance, a modest mountain in southern France, and thereby opening my eyes to the wonders of walking.

Fortunately, no ropes, pulleys or ice picks are involved in getting to the top of La Lance. There’s a nicely maitained path, steep and very rocky but navigable, that goes all the way to the top. In early spring you can see the path from a distance, criss-crossing the mountain like Harry Potter’s lightning-shaped scar. From the other side of the valley, my daughter called it “the writing on the mountain.” The path is like one very long sentence that tells the mountain’s story. You read it as you walk it, the way young children run a finger along each word as they move down the page. La Lance has an old story to tell. Embedded in one large slate slab in the middle of the path is a fossil, a partial impression of what once must have been an enormous ammonite. Millions of years ago La Lance was underwater. A more recent chapter in the mountain’s history is found near the summit: an old farmhouse perched on the edge of a lush green field that was once grazing ground for sheep, back when people still kept sheep around here.One of the paradoxes of climbing a mountain is that the very nature of the task forces you to look down while the whole point of the exertion is to look up. To get up that steep ascent I crouched into a kind of hunched position: my upper torso was almost parallel with the path while my legs were still perpendicular to it. It felt kind of like leaning into a strong wind; the mountain wasn’t going to make it easy for me. In that posture I crunched my way slowly up the path. On few occasions have I been as acutely aware of the muscles in my buttocks. If I hadn’t assumed this position I would never have noticed that ammonite fossil. Or the various animal tracks that were preserved in the soft earth beside the path. Or the strange feces on a flat rock from a species none of us could identify. In short, if I hadn’t been climbing La Lance I would never have noticed what was right there under my feet.

The Dutch aphorist Frans Hiddema has a great aphorism about climbing, which is slightly strange for a Dutchman since the only thing flatter than the Netherlands is a poorly delivered speech by President Bush:

He who is always climbing sees less and less of more and more.

Occasionally, I paused and looked up from the climb, remembering my goal. And then I was stunned at all I could see: mountains and pastures, vineyards and villages for close to 50 miles all around; in the furthest distance, the silver sliver of the Rhone. It was awesome. Climbing a mountain has a dual effect: it rubs your nose in the earth, making you work hard for every step, then unfurls a majestic vista that stops you in your tracks and can only be appreciated from a distance. During the climb, you get the mountain in close-up. When you stop, you get the big picture.

On Posture

There is good posture and bad posture; the former being that state in which all of the bones and muscles in your spine are in proper alignment, the latter being that in which they are out of joint. For a very long time I have had bad posture, the result of too often working 12- to 14- to 16-hour days hunched over a computer keyboard. The result: for the past eight months or so, I’ve had intense pain just below my right shoulder, under my shoulder blade. There is a spot there that feels like a knot in a thick old rope, the kind you see holding abandoned, weather-beaten old boats to the sides of dessicated docks. It feels all rough and gnarled, like someone ploughed gravel deep into the muscle fiber. I imagine it must look like a contorted tree root that years ago encountered some obstacle to its growth and twisted itself around it. I’ve been trying to straighten it out.

That’s not easy, though. Posture is more than anything else determined by force of habit. You acquire bad posture by repeatedly taking the wrong stance. Do anything long enough and you become it, or it becomes you. That’s equally true of emotions and thoughts, which is why the word posture can also apply to psychological states. You can adopt a defensive posture toward the world; an attitude of confidence, comraderie or cynicism may be just a posture, that is, an assumed position rather than one that comes naturally. Repeat it long enough and your thoughts and feelings begin to take the shape you have imposed on them.Correcting that is very difficult since habits are very hard to break. And if you’ve been in the habit for a long time, there can be a long way to go to get back to your natural state. My first step toward regaining good posture was to be aware that I didn’t have it. Right now, I’m sitting up very straight, with my shoulders back and my thighs level with the floor. Unfortunately, this really hurts, because my bad posture has so completely taken over the way I sit and inflicts pain every time I try to change it. Eventually, though, if I persist, good posture will prevail. As that knot in my back slowly unravels, the boat will slip quietly out to sea.

In one of his typically paradoxical aphorisms, the Taoist sage Lao Tzu wrote:

To remain whole, be twisted. To become straight, let yourself be bent. To become full, be hollow. Be tattered, that you may be renewed.

I bet Lao Tzu had pretty damn near perfect posture. But I’ve been bent out of shape for too long, twisted into too many knots. I have to say, though, that I’m grateful for the pain. Otherwise, I would never have known anything was wrong, that there was a different, better posture to take. You only really discover the strength of your spine when your back is against the wall.

On Seeing A Frog on My Street

London is remarkable for the variety of wildlife to be found on its streets. Our neighborhood is practically seething with foxes, for example. You see them skulking around trash cans late at night, or hurrying across the road in a flash of headlights. I always imagined foxes as sleek and elegant animals, but that was before I had any direct experience of them. On closer inspection, they are really pretty mangy creatures. Maybe that’s the price they pay for living in the city. London also supports a wide variety of birds and amphibians, partly because so many homes sport little ponds in the gardens. Ponds is perhaps giving these tiny bodies of water too much credit; they are really nothing more than glorified puddles. It is no doubt from one of these that the frog I saw on my street the other day had wandered.

I was walking my daughter home from school when we saw it on the sidewalk, leaping determinedly along a garden wall. It was totally unperturbed by our presence, its sides gently pulsing with respiration. We stopped and watched it for a while. I wanted to put it back on the other side of the wall, where it was less likely to be run over by a car or become an impromptu science experiment for a group of local boys. I tried to get it to leap into my daughter’s lunch box so I could toss it over the wall, but it refused to co-operate. I grew up in the suburbs, so it never occured to me to actually pick it up with my hands. But a builder who happened to be working nearby strolled up, grabbed the frog and clasped it to his chest, showed my daughter one last time and dropped it over the wall, where it plopped into the grass.I’ve only ever had one other close encounter with an animal in a city. It was in San Francisco and this time it was a reptile, a snake. At the time, I was studying Buddhist philosophy and psychology and was walking home from a lecture at the San Francisco Zen Center, which was located just a few blocks from where I lived. The Zen Center was in a pretty dodgy neighborhood, so I was always very alert to my environment on my walks home, especially at night. This time, though, I remember I was completely lost in thought, still immersed in the ancient Buddhist texts we had been discussing. As I walked up the street, completely oblivious to my surroundings, I was astonished to see a snake writhing and hissing right at my feet, right in the middle of the sidewalk. This was no grass snake, though, slender, scared and harmless. It was long and it was thick and sinewy, and for a moment I was scared witless. The snake seemed just as startled to see me, and it quickly slithered off, first into a patch of weeds and then under a parked car. I think it eventually climbed up into the wheel well.

I just stood there dumbfounded for a minute. Where could a snake like that have come from? I didn’t imagine they would occur naturally in a neighborhood as urban as this. I thought maybe it had escaped from someone’s aquarium, or maybe some bored kid got tired of it and just decided to let it loose. But those Buddhist texts were still in my head, and in Buddhist mythology snakes are very auspicious creatures, symbols of wisdom rather than evil as they are in the West. So it occured to me that encountering this snake on the sidewalk was a very good thing, a sign that I was on the path to wisdom, a road that I desperately needed to travel at the time. I walked the rest of the way home in a very good mood.

So what did this frog on the sidewalk symbolize? Well, at the moment my daughter is very much into fairy tales. One of the games we often play together is Sleeping Beauty. She pricks her finger on the side of her bed and then swoons dramatically, pretending to fall asleep on the floor, with a huge grin on her face. I then kiss her and she wakes up. But when she wakes up she’s not a princess, but a very angry lion who roars and brandishes her claws. The only defense against this lion is tickling her. I don’t think my daughter has come across the story ofThe Frog Prince yet. But every time I peck her cheek and she wakes up, I do indeed feel like a king.

And here’s the only aphorism I can think of at the moment that pertains to amphibians. Happily, it is irrelevant to the rest of this posting. It’s from Chamfort, who clearly must have kissed some unpleasant frogs in his time:

A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.

On Going to the Library

First of all, it’s nothing like going to a bookshop. That is always a slightly distressing experience, for me at least. I am invariably overwhelmed by the sheer number of books published, probably close to a million a year at least, and that’s just in English. The vast majority of these I would never want to read, of course, but that still leaves thousands and thousands of books that I just might be interested in. New non-fiction titles, new collections of poetry, new novels–how can I possibly keep up? I don’t normally think all that often about Schopenhauer, that curmudgeonly old bastard, but one of his aphorisms frequently pops up when I’m browsing in a bookshop:

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

And then there’s the sad realization that my book is one of these titles competing for shelf space; it’s literarally one in a million but a mere drop in this vast ocean of paper. In his wonderful memoir and rumination on the art of writing, Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly described his ambition “to write a book that will hold good for ten years afterwards.” A book that people would still want to read ten years after it was written, now that would be an accomplishment. Scanning the shelves in a bookshop I always wonder which titles will still be there in a decade. Will mine be one of them?

But going to the library is somehow much more like receiving a present. I’ve been going to the British Library a lot recently as part of my research for my encyclopedia of aphorists. When you think about it, going to the library should be a far more depressing experience for me as an author than going to a bookshop. In a bookshop, there are merely thousands of authors jostling for attention and literary longevity. In a library, particularly in the British Library, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of authors, all entombed inside their works, gathering dust in the Library’s vast storage areas. Samuel Johnson was searingly correct when he quipped:

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

But I always get a kick from going to the library. Part of my enjoyment has to do with the way you order books in the British Library. First, you find a seat. Then scan the electronic database for the books you want and order them electronically. Depending on where the books are actually physically located, they arrive within 70 minutes or 48 hours. A little light goes on at your desk asking you to come and collect them. So you walk up to the desk, show your library pass, the librarian retreats into the shelves and emerges with a pile of books stacked up like Christmas presents. Then back to your desk to unpack your treasures.

What is encouraging about a library, I guess, is the tantalizing sense that at any moment I could make an incredible discovery: a brilliant new aphorist whom nobody has heard of, a great new source for aphorists from languages and cultures that are strange to me. This is similar to the feeling I get in used bookshops, when I never know if the next beaten up old hardback without a dust jacket will turn out to be that edition of Hart Crane’s poems I’ve been looking for for years. Discoveries can be made in shops that sell new books, too, but there it often feels like someone else is in control of the possibilities. It feels as if there is less room for chance, partly because of the unrelenting stream of new books that are constantly appearing. Very quickly, it’s out with the old and in with the new.

I guess it’s a sense that libraries are like wildlife sanctuaries for books. A book may not survive long in the wild Darwinian competition of a bookshop. If it’s not adapted to the commercial environment of the moment, it will be whisked off the shelves within weeks. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. The writing, publishing and selling of books is a business, and only the strong deserve to survive in the marketplace. But in the marketplace of ideas a book must be judged by more than just its sales figures; its content might be priceless even though its sales are meagre. That’s why libraries are so important; that’s where books are not permitted to become extinct, where idea shoppers can roam the endless aisles inspired by the hope that they will eventually find the right product for them. That’s where a timeless book like Enemies of Promise, first published in 1938, can thrive for much longer than a mere ten years.

On Happiness

The other day at breakfast my younger son asked, “Dad, have you ever been 100% happy?” (My son has a way of asking impertinent philosophical questions at unexpected times.) I took a minute or so before I answered, because I wanted to give him a considered reply but also because I was a bit concerned about why he would be asking a question like that anyway. Finally I said that the times when I had been 100% happy were times when I was completely absorbed in some activity that I really liked. I had recently bought him a bag of 100 plastic soldiers, which he had been playing with obsessively for the past few days. “It’s like playing with your soldiers,” I said. “Aren’t you 100% happy when you’re doing that?” Then I discovered the reason he had asked the question in the first place. “Yes,” he said, “but then I remember I have to go to school and that spoils it.”

Schopenhauer believed that happiness and pleasure did not really exist. Suffering, he maintained, was our true baseline state:

The good things we possess, or are certain of getting, are not felt to be such; because all pleasure is in fact of a negative nature and effects the relief of pain, while pain or evil is what is really positive; it is the object of immediate sensation.

I’ve never had much sympathy for that point of view. Even if it’s true, which I strongly contest, it’s not a very practical philosophy by which to live your life. The pursuit of happiness can indeed be fruitless, misguided, even ultimately doomed. But that’s all the more reason to make sure that the process itself is pleasurable; that way you enjoy the pursuit just as much as, sometimes even more than, achieving the goal. And if you don’t achieve the goal, you still enjoyed the chase.

My son’s question got me thinking about what makes me 100% happy. The last time that I was 100% happy for a full 24 hours was on my wedding day. As an adult, I find that happiness tends to come in short bursts; as a child, it was easier to be more intensely happy for much longer periods. That’s not because life becomes less pleasurable as you get older, but because children are naturally more able to inhabit their bliss. There are fewer intrusions on a child’s imagination when it is at play. Adults are more easily distracted, by work, by money, by a host of other more nebulous worries, by other people’s feelings. This is something my son, at 8, is now beginning to discover.

Here are some of my happiest moments from the past week: when I found my daughter’s stuffed bunny rabbit on the sidewalk where we had unwittingly dropped it on the way to school; listening to Led Zeppelin in the car with my elder son; when I heard my daughter had got a place at the same primary school her brothers attend; when I discovered two new aphorists, the German J.G. Zimmerman and the American Washington Allston, for my next book; when I wrote two new pieces for another book I’m working on and felt that they were good. These were all moments of intense happiness, however fleeting. String them together with all the other happy moments and they make for a pretty good week. Which is why I much prefer Spinoza’s take on happiness over crusty old Schopenhauer’s:

Happiness or unhappiness is made wholly to depend on the quality of the object which we love.

Later on the same day I had that breakfast conversation with my son, I noticed that he had been in the toilet for a long time. So I called upstairs to see if he was alright. Yes, he was alright, he shouted back. “But what are you doing?” I asked. “Thinking and writing,” he replied. “About what?” I asked. “It’s a secret,” he said. What bliss. An oasis of solitude and silence in which to think and to write. Your loved ones elsewhere in the house busy with their own activities and minding their own business. Ahead of you the prospect of several hours of uninterrupted play, and the weekend on its way. And who knows, maybe even pasta for dinner. A recipe for 100% happiness.

On Vocabulary

“Can I say ‘annoying’?” That’s the question my daughter has been asking me of late, as she explores the boundaries of the new vocabulary she is learning. “Yes, you can say ‘annoying,’” I reply. “Can I say ’shut up’?” she asks. “No, you can’t say ’shut up.’” “And I can’t say ’shit’,” she states matter-of-factly. That’s right, she already knows she can’t say ’shit’ but she still gets a tremendous kick from just quickly confirming that fact with me because to do so, of course, means getting to say ’shit’ all over again without fear of punishment. It’s like the joke my son told me the other day, warning me ahead of time that it contained a curse: A 6-year-old boy was scolded by his parents for still talking like a baby. ‘Why don’t you use more grown-up words,’ they said. So the next day, when he got home from school, his parents asked him what he had done in class and he said: ‘We read a book called Winnie the Shit.’

Words have an awesome power, and there’s no clearer example of that than when children deploy new vocabulary to see what effect their words have on the world. My daughter, for example, wields the word ‘annoying’ all the time now, using it to describe anything and everything that elicits her displeasure. My son, who’s eight, enjoys using mild curse words in safe contexts, like in a joke. He hears other kids using them for real in the schoolyard and can see the mixture of shock and admiration their use evokes in other children. My kids are learning that words are not just airy nothings; they have a very real and dramatic impact on the world—they can make other people laugh or cry, they can help get you what you want, they can get you into or out of a lot of trouble, too.

Adults are usually unconscious of the latent power of language, but you can feel it in full force again when learning a foreign tongue. One of Austrian philosopherLudwig Wittgenstein’s best aphorisms is:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

I felt my linguistic limits extended when I learned Dutch about 17 years ago. Each language has words in it that don’t exist in any other tongue, and one of the greatest joys of speaking another language is stretching your mind to encompass this new vocabulary.Gezellig is a word like that in Dutch. It has so many nuanced meanings that it’s impossible to find a simple English equivalent. Indeed, thereis no single English equivalent since gezellig is a word that expresses a distinctly Dutch state of mind. It means different things in different circumstances. An evening with friends can begezellig, meaning friendly and intimate and fun. But inanimate objects can also be gezellig, like a room with a roaring fire in the fireplace, meaning cozy and inviting. But an individual can also be gezellig, meaning that he or she is warm and welcoming. It was not until I learned Dutch, and came to understand the meaning of this word, that I was able to recognize the quality of gezelligheid when I saw it. This not only added a new word to my vocabulary; it added a new experience to my world.

And so it is with my daughter. At almost four years old, she is intrepidly exploring the world of words, experimenting with language to see which words cause happiness, which words cause pain, which words make people laugh, which words make them cry. By trying out words like ‘annoying’, ’shut up’ and ’shit’ on me, she’s testing to see if they cause the desired effect. This is something we never stop doing. What American poet John Hall Wheelock wrote is just as true of adults as it is for children: