bibliophilia

from weheartit.com

I've always been an avid reader and writer. Even when time doesn't permit the freedom to actually engage in those pursuits on a regular, meaningful level, I still keep up with my daily New York Times browsings and weekly New Yorker enlightenings. So yes, even though I am part of a generation for which the appreciation of the written word is dying, I continue to be drawn to reading. So much so, in fact, that I get overwhelmed sometimes.

Why overwhelmed? I am currently reading (or attempting to read, rather) David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. All 1,000 pages of it. I had heard from various people that every single sentence of Wallace's is constructed with such care that it literally changes your world view, with every punctuation mark, every syntax choice. A bold statement, my friends, so I decided to check it out for myself.

What I'm finding out, as I read sentences two or three times in order to be sure I have the gist of it, is that literature is art. Honestly. Not that I didn't realize that before, to an extent, but this book is different. As my friends had said, Wallace plays with and manipulates the English language so skillfully, in ways that I have not read or seen before. He uses sentence structures that are beyond my comprehension. I am reading with a pencil in my hand, underlining phrases I like (as I often do), but also circling the words whose meaning escapes me.

That, I think, is the most overwhelming part: the fact that there are so many words in this language that I will never know--and I thought my vocabulary was pretty good! (I like how I chose to use the word "good" there; I'm sure I could have come up with a more advanced synonym...right?) And yet, despite the vast number of words in the English language (over 200,000 entries in the OED, with more being added year after year as terms such as "unfriend" enter the popular lexicon) there are phenomena for which our language lacks a precise word.

Such as (thanks, StumbleUpon):

• l'esprit d'escalier: (French) The feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when you think of all the things you should have said. Translated, it means "the spirit of the staircase."
• waldeinsamkeit: (German) The feeling of being alone in the woods.
• meraki: (Greek) Doing something with soul, creativity, or love.
• forelsket: (Norwegian) The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love.
• gheegle: (Filipino) The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute.
• pochemuchka: (Russian) A person who asks a lot of questions.
• pena ajena: (Mexican Spanish) The embarrassment you feel watching someone else's humiliation.
• cualacino: (Italian) The mark left on a table by a cold glass.

And yet, somehow, we get by. Somehow we can still communicate and understand each other, even though our language--and other languages--are imprecise. Imprecise yet indispensable. Where did all these words come from?

At the risk of becoming a pochemuchka, I will stop here--only to experience l'esprit d'escalier a bit later, I'm sure. Ah well. At least I meraki-d.

lucky duck

The other night at dinner, my dad told me about a professional poker player named Johnny Chan. Now, I'm not into poker (I'm sure I could be if I could wrap my head around what was going on) but what intrigued me about this guy is the fact that he won the World Series of Poker two years in a row (1987 and 1988), which is pretty impressive. Strategy, or luck? Chan is known for keeping a "lucky" orange with him at the poker table. Before every play, he'll dig into the rind with his fingernails and sniff the citrusy scent. It's apparently to clear his head, but now that smoking at the poker table is no longer allowed, it's become sort of moot. Still, it's his trademark. It's habit.

So that got me thinking about luck, and the superstitions we associate with it. There's hundreds of them, I'm pretty sure. Four leaf clovers, rabbit feet, fingers crossed, et cetera. Ladybugs and butterflies landing on you is considered good luck. Rainbows are lucky. I've even been told that being pooped on (by a bird..) is excellent luck. Granted, that might have just been because I was pretty upset about that incident. I think that, for a lot of people, religion can also be considered a special sort of good luck charm.

It goes the other way, too. Breaking a mirror is seven years of bad luck. The number thirteen is unlucky in all of its permutations. If you happen to spill salt, make sure to throw some over your shoulder. Never open umbrellas indoors or walk underneath ladders. Black cat crossed your path lately? Might want to spit three times if it has.

Why do most superstitions revolve around the idea of luckiness? Why do many of us believe in good luck charms? Is it a bit of a placebo effect-- in that we believe they may work, but really it's our hard work and preparation and maybe a bit of coincidence that makes things work out the way they do? But then, isn't coincidence sort of like luck? If it's the good kind, anyway..

As Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) once said, "Some days, even my lucky rocketship underpants won't help." Those lucky charms (no, not the cereal..) don't do anything. It's all up to us. Why don't we believe that we can do it all ourselves, and instead search fruitlessly for a four leaf clover? How come we need an object, a symbol, a ritual, to give us that extra courage?

You can do it! Just do it.
With the help of some Nikes, of course.