There is something perplexing about attempting to express oneself in any language. This issue becomes more salient when what we are trying to articulate is an experience rife with a mosaic of sentiments too complex to comprehend outright, let alone to transform into words.
The constant urge to do so, though, does not emerge out of nothing. Our compulsion is primarily driven by an inexplicable urge to dress fuzzy pre-conceptual experiences in words that we understand in order to be able to share them with others.
In an attempt to capture our fleeting experiences, we might try everything at our disposal to grab on to, and subsequently frame, memories that seem to make our lives more colorful, in hopes of chiseling ourselves into becoming interesting individuals not only vis a vis ourselves, but also in the eyes of others.
We encounter such an interesting example in the novel Night Train to Lisbon written by the philosophy professor Peter Bieri under the pseudonym Pascal Mercier. At the very beginning the protagonist of the story (Raimund Gregorius), a teacher of classics at a Gymnasium in the city of Bern, Switzerland, has an encounter that would forever change his life.
On his way to school, Gregorius meets a lady wearing a red coat standing on the Kirchenfeld Bridge, ready to jump and end her life. No sooner than Gregorius realizes this than he rushes to try and stop her — and he does so successfully. She, later on, accompanies him to school, and along the way, he learns that her native language was Portuguese.
As banal and mundane as this happenstance might seem, it was sufficient to turn Gregorius’ life upside down in a way he wouldn’t have imagined.
The experience itself might have had nothing to do with the radical decisions he would subsequently make, but it definitely played a rather crucial role in the abrupt shift that would see him embarking on an odyssey of self-discovery and transformation.
Experiences of this caliber tend to instigate us to brusquely but intentionally decide to change the course of our lives as a consequence of an inevitable outburst due to the endless, unconscious, accumulation of selves that one keeps hoarding with the passing of time.
One day we think we’re going to start a new job at our dream company, the other we find ourselves doing something we wouldn’t have imagined doing not in a hundred years’ time.
Change is infinitesimal and can be very difficult to discern. Crossing a certain threshold, we look in the mirror and understand that we cannot recognize ourselves anymore.
Where does this dissonance come from though? Why is it too difficult to ‘go with the flow’, to give in to the uncertainties of life, and incorporate change as a core feature of life? These questions present themselves in their blinding clarity when on a day like any other Gregorius is stricken by a sudden realization that he did not know who he was anymore.
In a fate-like circumstance, Gregorius knew that something was different the second he met the lady in red standing on the bridge reading a paper under the rain. Somehow this event made him decide to leave his stuff behind and walk away from school without looking back.
Driven by a curious desire to plunge himself into the unknown, the initial contours of the rebellion against his previous self materialized in the form of breakfast, which he left intact, at a hotel’s restaurant where he had never been before.
After that, he visited a Spanish bookshop that he used to frequent. The concatenation of events led him to stumble upon a book, written in Portuguese, left behind on a table by a customer. The encounter with the lady in red was still haunting him, and it seemed to him that the pieces of the puzzle were coming right into place.
Gregorius knew that the compass of his exciting new endeavor was pointing in the right direction when the first paragraph, which he made the owner of the bookstore read and translate for him, said the following:
“Of thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, and its melody. Then, when we turn to these treasures, as archeologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. The subject of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper. For a long time, I thought it was a defect, something to be overcome. Today I think it’s different: that recognition of the confusion is the ideal path to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic experiences. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light, I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time.”
It was a passage that resonated strongly with him, so much so that he decided to jump on a train to Lisbon to track down the writer of the book titled A Goldsmith of Words by Amadeu de Prado. De Prado, as Gregorius would eventually figure out, was a medical doctor who had helped treat one of the central figures of the Salazar regime. Motivated by a sense of guilt at having saved the Butcher of Lisbon’s life, he decided to join the resistance in penitence for his ‘sin’.
In a sense, Gregorius was on a journey of self-discovery that was primarily guided by a curiosity to learn more about the biography of Amadeu de Prado. Perhaps, he thought to himself, he would know more about himself by getting to walk in the shoes of someone else. During the ‘search’, Gregorius had the time to contemplate and reflect upon himself by recalling important episodes of his life when he had to make crucial decisions, and to imagine alternative scenarios in the case that he had chosen differently. Deciphering de Prado’s book, he thought to himself, he would be able to authentically know himself more profoundly.
However, two things scared Gregorius during his quest more than anything else:
1) falling unconscious because of recurrent episodes of dizziness which, he thought, could cause memory loss, and
2) seeing any doctor whom he didn’t know fearing that the doctor would make him lose himself.
This latter was a major source of concern right before getting some medicals done following the advice of his Ophthalmologist. “What if they find something bad? Something that would make me lose myself?” Gregorius asked him.
Gregorius dealt with his terrible hypochondria-like fear by finding recourse in the static, dead languages of the past, like ancient Greek and Hebrew. However, one of de Prado’s reflections cited below, prompted him to reexamine his views.
“Maybe it’s like this: I’d like to rearrange Portuguese words. The sentences that would emerge from this new order must not be odd or eccentric, not exalted, affected or artificial. They must be archetypal sentences in Portuguese so that you have the feeling that they originated directly and from the transparent, sparkling nature of this language. The words must be as unblemished as polished marble, and they must be pure as the notes in a Back partita, which turn everything that is not themselves into a perfect silence. Sometimes, when I am feeling more tolerant about the linguistic morass, I think, it could be the easy silence of a living room or the relaxed silence between lovers. But when I am totally possessed by rage over the clichéd use of words, then it must be nothing less than the clear, cool silence of outer space, where I make my solitary way as the only person who speaks Portuguese.”
For Gregorius, the passage felt like a call to return to the basics of a language in order to reinvent it in an attempt to capture the concreteness of life experiences. The result, as de Prado suggests, would be an ‘unblemished, laconic text’; a language that, while not completely new, succeeds to express beautifully the essence of inner experiences.
De Prado’s reflection underscores a human necessity to continuously renew oneself like a chrysalis throughout different stages in our lives.
Externally, this idea manifests in the form of excessive consumption. Buying the latest model of any product seems to satisfy a lurking desire to periodically renew and revitalize ourselves.
Internally, it manifests in the form of a constant struggle to articulate the mounting change in our idiosyncrasies which, according to de Prado and Gregorius, can be achieved by waxing lyrical in the hopes of capturing our concrete experiences through a genuine discourse rather than by alluding to concepts or languages long dead.
This is echoed by Amadeu de Prado’s reflections. He asserts that expressing oneself anew can be achieved by twisting languages to resuscitate faded concepts to make them adapt to our continuously evolving life experiences.
Unfortunately, this struggle never ends because as Nietzsche, who had a fine grasp of this interminable dance, eloquently writes:
“Alas! what are you, my written and my painted thoughts! Not long ago you were young and malicious and full of thorns and secret spices- you made me sneeze and laugh- and now? You have doffed your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths, so immortal do they look, so tediously honest! And was it ever otherwise? What then do we write and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brush? Alas, only that which is about to fade and lose its scent! Alas, only birds exhausted by flight, which let themselves be caught with our hand! We immortalize things exhausted and mellow! And it is only for your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have many colors; but nobody will divine how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and marvels of my solitude, you, my old, beloved- wicked thoughts!”