Nothing Quite Hits Like Art You Experience in a Language You're Learning
The profound joy of reading and experiencing culture in a new language
When you’re learning a language, every sentence is its own little puzzle. You need to pause, take your time, and slowly assemble the meaning in each word phrase.
And I’ve found that this act itself brings you closer to a work: that when you have to put work into deciphering meaning, and when that meaning is profound and beautiful, it registers deeper because of the labor you’ve put in to decipher it.
Extra Thoughts
Recently I’ve been reading this book Osweald Bera: A Guide to Old English. It’s an Old English language textbook that works through immersion. Every chapter is written in Old English, but the first few chapter starts with sentences that Modern English language speakers can understand easily and then slowly ramps up the difficulty until, by the end of the book, you’re reading full literary Old English.
And I have found it intensely pleasurable; in a way literature hasn’t made me feel for a while. And it’s precisely because you’re learning how to read the book as you read it. It’s almost like an ongoing puzzle book (with the benefit that, by the end of it, you might just be able to read Beowulf in the original language!).
A lot of my long fiction projects play a lot with language, which doesn’t make for easy reads. And one thing I’ve had to reflect on is that, with works like that, I don’t have the luxury of breezy prose and slow openings. When every sentence is a challenge to the reader, they are going to expect a reward for each sentence: every sentence needs to be made all the more meaningful; the prose needs to get a lot tighter.
In short, the pacing of a work needs to correspond to the difficulty of your style. You don’t have the luxury of writing difficult, wordy, and attention-intensive prose if you don’t have much to say.
This Substack post is a companion to these reels.
Please let me know what you think. I love you.