People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
Interpretation
Bilingual individuals appreciate that different languages can articulate unique facets of truth and perception.
This quote by Siri Hustvedt emphasizes the cognitive and perceptual advantages that come from being multilingual. It suggests that each language has its own nuances and capabilities, allowing speakers to articulate thoughts and emotions in ways that may not be possible in a single language. This linguistic diversity enriches their understanding of reality, enabling them to see and express the world from multiple perspectives.
In practice
In a discussion on the benefits of learning multiple languages.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.
Giving children the sense that you always ought to speak up for what's right, even if it costs you something, that's something you can do.
In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.
You cannot open a book without learning something.
Sloppy language and sloppy ways go together. Those who are truly educated have learned more than the sciences, the humanities, law, engineering, and the arts. They carry with them a certain polish that marks them as loving the better qualities of life, a culture that adds luster to the mundane world of which they are apart, a patina that puts a quiet glow on what otherwise might be base metal.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.