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.