姜小白对《Shortest Way Home》的笔记(2)

“Plus, a bit vaguely, I figured that knowing Arabic would be useful for a future career in public service or journalism.

It was hard—much harder than the French and Spanish I had studied in high school, or even the Maltese (also a Semitic language) that I had picked up from my father. But it was also a highly rewarding language to learn. At first the English-speaking learner struggles to grab hold of something, since there are almost no similarities between our words and theirs. But after a year or two of learning, the structure of the language begins to unfold and reveal itself—and unlike almost any other language, you can derive most words you don’t know by using the words you do know. After a while it’s all prefixes, suffixes, and rearrangement of a few vowels to make whole families of words according to strict patterns. It all works by analogy: you can take the same changes you you make to the word for “cooking” to get the word for “kitchen,” and do it to the word for “writing” to get the word for “office.”

When I showed up in late 2000, not many people were studying Arabic. I don’t think there were more than a dozen of us in that first-year class my freshman fall. Most were Arab or Jewish students interested in getting in touch with personal roots. We knew the Middle East was important, but we had no idea that one year later the entire trajectory of America’s relationship with the Muslim world would shift.”

“Waking up comes hard. I’ve never been a morning person, and nothing can take the edge off a 5:30 cell phone alarm tunneling into the sweet haze of sleep. Strategically placed, the phone sits in the next room so that I can’t snooze or silence it without first getting out of bed. That four-second-long walk will bring just enough alertness to remember my promises. I must stay in motion, and not slide back into the warmth of my dreams.

I try not to wake Chasten as I slip out from under the covers and walk to the small table where the phone sits. Truman is indifferent, curled up into a brown fur oval on a bench two feet from the bed. I lumber across the floorboards of the landing toward the bathroom to brush my teeth. The one-inch white hexagonal tile, cold on my feet, is the same kind as in the foursquare house where I grew up, some five hundred feet away. In the mirror, I make eye contact with an unshaven, bleary-eyed man in his mid-thirties, looking harmless but not thrilled to see me at this hour. I’ll just never be a morning person.”