It is possible to determine how important a thing is to a society by the number of words that society has for it. The number of subtle distinctions shows how much time they have spent thinking about it, how familiar they are with it, how important a part it plays in their lives. Thus, the Eskimo have twenty-two words for snow; the Bedouin, thirty-one words for sand.
From these kinds of examples the argument is also derived that to understand a culture, one must first understand its language.
And it is also these kinds of examples that make some cognitive scientists and linguists believe that language is the most useful tool we have for understanding the brain’s higher functions. The brain receives information about the world through the senses and then organizes that information. And because language is entirely an abstract creation of the brain designed to help convey that organization, the idea is that if we can understand how language is designed, we can then understand how the brain functions by a kind of reverse engineering. The idea is that words expose us.
And some of the exhaustion, a good part perhaps, you can’t say how much exactly, some of the exhaustion is purely physical.
You always seem to be moving. You always seem to be in planes or cars, always going from one place to another where you sit and talk for an hour or two and then move on. You spend months at a time away from any of your houses. You’re always taking vitamins, herbal supplements, always terrified you’re going to get sick, terrified you’re not going to be able to make a meeting, appear before a major shareholder.
So the last thing you want to do when you do reach somewhere you can call your own, when you do have a second to just sit still and do nothing, the last thing you want to do is anything.
And maybe this is why, when you’re visiting a line and the manager who’s showing you around says to one of the workers over the noise of the machines, “Vikki, you’re still here? Lot of overtime today, huh?” and she really does wipe the sweat off her face and say, “WHAT?” and he says, “LOT OF OVERTIME TODAY,” and she smiles and nods and looks at you and shrugs and says, “MORTGAGE WON’T PAY ITSELF, RIGHT?” this is why then you can say, “I HEAR THAT!”
Except you do and you don’t. Not because even though you work just as hard you’re hardly worried about making ends meet, but because she can go home and take a bath and wash it all away. Because, even if only for a little while, she can forget it all. Because she, unlike you, does not live in perpetual terror of losing. And she never will.
You are helping your daughter with a school project she is doing on cruelty to animals, on the various ways in which animals are exploited by humans, and you come across an interview with a man who commanded a K-
9
unit in Vietnam. When asked if he thought using dogs in war was cruel, if he felt sorry for them because they didn’t ask to be there, because they had no control over whether they were there or not, he answered, “Let me tell you something about these dogs — they fucking love it, they love being part of a team, they love having a purpose, they love to work. When we’re just sitting around waiting for an op, they get bored. Even when they’re being petted and fed scraps and played with, they’ll sit around and whine and groan and huff and puff until we get orders. And then they’re the first ones in the truck. They leap up there and pant and grin and pace until the truck starts moving. While we’re sitting there wondering if we’ll make it back, they can’t wait to get there. And I know what you’re going to say, ‘They don’t understand they might die out there — they don’t know about pain.’ Well let me tell you something else — even if they get wounded they don’t want to stop going.
“If you actually knew these dogs, if you’d spent time with them instead of thinking they’re like your little poodle at home, you’d know that you don’t feel the most sorry for them when they get hurt. You feel the most sorry for them when the next op comes around and they run over to the truck on three legs or misjudge the jump into the back because they’re missing an eye. You feel the most sorry for them when the truck drives off and you look back and see them standing there panting, wondering why they’re not allowed to come, wondering what they did wrong. You feel the most sorry for them when you see that they don’t know their life is over, not when they don’t understand it might end.”
And yet sometimes, times when you are in the best of moods, when everything has just come together the way you’d planned, when you haven’t begun to worry about the next step, a girl will walk past with her friends. She will be wearing a skirt you would never let your daughter wear and her legs will be longer than her torso and you will turn and watch her until she disappears and it will be then and only then that you will realize you haven’t been breathing.
“‘There I found Odysseus standing among the dead men he had killed, and they covered the hardened earth, lying piled on each other around him. You would have been cheered to see him, spattered over with gore and battle filth, like a lion.’” — Eurykleia to Penelope,
Odyssey
23:45
You are taking your daughter out to dinner. She is your oldest, from your first marriage. Her name is Jennifer or Sandy or something reasonable like that, nothing too unusual, your first wife was never one to take risks.
She is a freshman at one of the most progressive colleges in the country and you are at one of the restaurants near campus that many of the students go to for dates and other special occasions. They seat you next to a young couple in the middle of their meal, from their conversation about what movies they like, obviously on a first date. After you sit down your daughter leans across the table a little bit and gestures for you to come close and when you do she says in a loud whisper, “That girl’s my floor’s dorm adviser — she’s a women’s studies major — she is such a pain in the ass!”
“Do you want to move?” you whisper back.
“No,” she says in a normal voice as she leans back. “This is cool.”
And you have a perfectly pleasant meal. You were very lucky, your daughter has never held it against you that you left her mother for a younger woman nor that you left that younger woman for a girl only slightly older than her. She’s very progressive, your daughter, very forgiving, very understanding. She knows everything, wonders why people can’t just compromise and get along. And this matters to you, it really does. You think it would make you unhappy if she was angry with you.
But she isn’t, the two of you get along extraordinarily well, in fact. Sometimes, in fact, when you see your friends with their children, you wonder if the reason you relate so much better to your daughter than they do to theirs is precisely because you spend so much time with a girl almost as young as she is, because you can walk into her dorm room and see a poster on her wall and say, “Cindy and I checked out their show last month” instead of, “They’re a band, are they?”
And in the middle of your meal, after they clear away the oysters, after she says, “Yes, I would like another glass,” as Jennifer or Sandy or Catherine or whatever her name is starts telling you about one of her professors, how much she likes him, how he’s taken an interest in her, as she starts doing that you notice that the waitress just brought the check to the couple next to you.
And although the girl doesn’t even reach for it, the boy snatches it up. “How much is it?” she asks, reaching down to get her purse from the floor next to her.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Let me get it.”
And she says, “Are you sure?” still leaning over to one side.
And he says, “Absolutely.”
And she says, “Well, okayyy . . . if you’re sure . . . ” sitting up straight at last.
And he smiles at her and proudly counts out some tiny sum, less than the cost of the bottle of wine you and your daughter are drinking. Because of where he is sitting, across from her, you know he couldn’t have seen what you saw sitting next to them. You know he couldn’t have seen that when she reached down for her purse, she never, at any point, actually reached down far enough to touch it.
And you wonder what the hell she’s thinking. If he was some new friend of hers, she never would have let him pay. Or if she did, she would know that at some point, if she wanted to remain friends, she’d have to pay him back later with money not “friendship,” that later she’d have to cover the cost of the drinks or the movie. She’d know enough not to mix money and friendship, know enough not to let the balance of accounts between her and a friend become imbalance, so why with a potential boyfriend does she think it’s OK not only to let him pay, but to start off their entire relationship that way? Even if she believes he is only paying for the pleasure of her company, even if, in fact, he is, would she expect a friend to buy that from her? Does she think in this case it’s “romantic”? Does it make her feel “special,” like a “princess”?
What happens later? What happens if this relationship works out for a while, for long enough for them to get married, to have children, what happens later when she is too old or too damaged or both to give him the things he was paying for all those years? What happens then? Doesn’t she realize the cost of his worrying about money, about bearing weight, about being protector and provider, the cost of his covering the mud with his cloak, the cost of his “doing the right thing” if she gets pregnant, the cost of his holding open doors will be far more than her half of all the meals they will ever share together? Doesn’t she realize that later, the cost of his chivalry will be his feeling he has earned the right to be dishonest every now and then?
And yet, as they stand up, she knows enough to hand him the doggie bag full of the food she only half ate and say, “Here, you should take this.”
And you turn to your daughter and interrupt her in the middle of a sentence you haven’t been listening to anyway and say, “Annie, promise me something — don’t ever let a man pay for you. Ever.”
And she looks at you and frowns and then raises the frown high on her forehead and glances off to the side for a second and says, “Okayyy, Dad . . . ”
“I mean it,” you say, “really.”
And she says, “I promise, I promise . . . geez!” then, “Hey, can we try and get some more oysters before the other food comes?”
But we do love our plumbing and our penicillin, don’t we?
And yet, at the end of the day, wouldn’t you feel a little bit silly if you said what we all think whether we know we think it or not? If you said, “Well, yes, actually I do feel like I should be treated like a conquering hero for closing that deal with Packard. I do feel like I deserve gifts of women and gold and respect.” Wouldn’t this seem a little bit silly? After all, it’s not like you killed anyone.
Odysseus was a hero to the Greeks but a villain to the Trojans. And when is it not such?
But you’d never complain. Those men that bitch really bother you, those men who say, “Man, I can’t believe I have to do another trade show,” and “Damn it, I don’t want to work another weekend.” It’s not like they couldn’t quit anytime if they really wanted to.
And there are so many other possibilities. There is the local waitress that, to his surprise, takes an interest in the utility worker on his hunting trip up into the mountains, perhaps because, for her, it is simply enough to overhear him mention he lives near something she’s always wanted to see. There is the college student approaching the guest speaker after his talk and asking him so many questions, displaying such interest, that he finds himself asking her if she’d like to talk about it over dinner. There is the teacher and student bumping into each other outside of school, over a weekend, going for coffee together. There is the teacher and student alone in the classroom after most people have left the building. There really are starlets and directors, confessors and priests, actresses and politicians. There really are interns, baby-sitters.
The money just presents more opportunities, more temptations, creates interest more often. Just because the money is a facilitator doesn’t mean it can’t happen without it.
But it does mean the man who tells his wife he was working late feels less guilty than the man who says he was working overtime.
Everyone forgets that Odysseus and Achilles and Agamemnon, all of them, all the Argives and the Trojans both, all of them were real people.
Or perhaps when your heart begins to beat fast in the conference room, you don’t speak up or you back down. Perhaps you don’t want to make waves, enemies, a fool of yourself. Perhaps you have an idea you’re pretty sure is great but not absolutely sure and as much as you’d really like to quit your job and start your own company, you worry about making enough to live off, about backup plans, about how much is in the savings account that never has enough.
Maybe when you go to get another bottle of red from the kitchen, when your best friend’s daughter or your daughter’s best friend corners you, when she surprises the hell out of you by pressing her body up against yours as you turn around with the bottleneck in one hand and the corkscrew in the other, maybe when that happens, you ask her what she’s doing. Maybe when that happens, you do the “right” thing and she apologizes, gets incredibly embarrassed, calls you “Mr.” whatever, says she’s never had this much wine before, hurries back into the living room grabbing a box of crackers on the way. Maybe when that happens, you start to follow her but then decide you’d better open the bottle of wine in the kitchen so, before you rejoin the party, your erection has time to go down.
And maybe, just maybe, as you open the wine, as you slip with the knife when trying to cut the foil away and nick your thumb, your best friend or daughter comes into the kitchen and asks if you’ve seen their daughter or best friend. And you say, “She was just here — I thought she went back in the other room.” And they say, “Oh — that’s strange — must have just missed her,” and they turn around and leave and you think to yourself, “See?”
And then you’ll lie there that night when she’s asleep (wife) and think how you could never do it, how by doing it you could lose everything you have — the house, the wife you’re not sure you don’t love — how your daughter probably wouldn’t speak to you again or not for a long time at least. It’s not much, it’s true, but it’s more than most have, it’s better than jail where you’d get anally raped, it’s better than working at McDonald’s.