It’s not a small world; quit calling it that

I recall one evening last year, standing out on the steps ofVirginia-Snider and listening to bits of a interesting conversationbetween two people.

It was interesting not because I can remember any of theparticulars of the conversation, but rather, within a span of 15minutes, I heard the languages Farsi, French, and Russian allspoken. This has actually come to be one of the defining moments inmy academic life.

A great bell jar seemed to shatter around me and I saw for thefirst time what an ignorant American I truly was. So began my questto try and acquaint myself with at least a few of thisworld’s abundant and alien cultures.

I first turned my attention towards the old masters of theWestern world, namely the Romans. However, rather than revisitantiquity, I decided to study the language and culture ofRome’s current inhabitants, the Italians.

Now, Italian is a beautiful language and the food ismeraviglioso, but alas, it did not slake my thirst for the trulyforeign.

So, this time I spun the globe a bit further and signed myselfup for Japanese. At the time, I could not imagine what I wasgetting myself into. There is a satisfaction I cannot accuratelydescribe that comes from a character ceasing to be an oddscribbling and transforming itself into a concept. I dare say it isa moment of true epistemological bliss.

But the miraculous mind-expansion brought on by learning thegrammar and vocabulary of a language does not stop in meretranslation.

The true greatness of learning a language as foreign as Japaneseis coming to understand how people view the world on the mostfundamental level.

For example, the word “green” in both English andJapanese, is capable of being a noun or an adjective.

However, in English, when one says “the grass isgreen,” the greenness of the grass becomes subordinate to thegrass itself. In other words, the grass may be green in theaforementioned sentence, but we are primarily concerned with thegrass. We are then concerned with its secondary attributes, such asits color.

In Japanese, this is not the case. The greenness of the grass isjust as important as the thing it describes. Even though green is adescription of the grass, the grammar insures that the greennessremains its own distinct and important entity.

We must consider it of equal value to the grass itcharacterizes. This kind of distinction, which may seem trivial atfirst glance, illustrates a fundamental difference in the way ourtwo cultures see and comprehend the world.

At what point did we as Westerners stop concerning ourselves asmuch with the details of the things we see and discuss? Why is itthat when I say, “There is a gigantic lizard rampagingthrough downtown,” English grammar believes that the lizardis more important than the fact that it is gigantic.

Does it not seem reasonable that the immensity of said creatureis far more important than its species?

Then on the other side of the coin one might ask: When did theJapanese get so hung up on these abstract and imperfect qualitiesof things?

I can’t have “gigantic,” if I have no lizardto be “gigantic.” So should I not concern myself firstand foremost that there is a creature there, then worry aboutwhether or not it can topple buildings with its mighty limbs? A”gigantic ______” may represent an existential crisis,but it certainly doesn’t warrant calling in the militaryand/or another giant creature to combat it.

This is not a small world as some people are so fond of saying.This is a gargantuan cultural universe that expands every time youlearn something new about it.

It is impossible to say you can understand anything in thisworld when the way you should experience it is still up in theair.

What I propose is not simple every answer I receive gives me a100 more questions. At least I know that I do not know.

I implore you not to limit yourselves to one sphere ofunderstanding; see how big the world really is.

My final entreaty is put best in an old Norse proverb: “Awise man is one who knows more and more about less and less untilhe knows everything about nothing.”