For one thing, my love for books divided me from everybody, including my family — most of whom seemed to be busily doing the things people were supposed to do, such as socializing, developing professional careers, dating, and watching television. With the exception of my mother, who read less as she grew ill in the late ’60s, most people I knew didn’t read anything and those that did read passed around the usual cultish ’60s books that, I’m sorry to say, never stopped being cultish books over the next half century, such as Catch-22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (I always hated that book), Fahrenheit 451, and the novels of Hesse, Kesey, and Vonnegut. Occasionally, someone introduced me to something unusual, such as Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, George Stewart’s Earth Abides, or Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon; but, for the most part, when anyone came to my room and saw the secondhand bookshelves filled with paperbacks — most of which I purchased or stole from the local Woolworth’s — they looked at me askance and made clear that they had better things to do with their time than read books, or walk to the store to buy books, or try to write books themselves — which were, of course, the only things I ever did. (And to be totally honest, I haven’t done much else since.)
But even more significant to my poorly developing self-image, it was hard to imagine any important writer living my life. I’m speaking specifically about a life in either Daly City or San Luis Obispo, the two cities where I spent my youth. There weren’t any writers showing up at career days or wandering in and out of my home or the homes of friends and neighbors. Instead, everybody with “grown-up” jobs did sensible things like work as machinists, or auto repairmen, or administrators in local schools and government buildings — a lot of jobs that, quite frankly, puzzled me then and still puzzle me now. (Seriously, I have no idea what most people do for a living.) And, however widely I read, and however many writers I read about, there didn’t seem to be many California writers running loose among them. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure what being a Californian meant. I didn’t know then and I don’t know much more now.
When Carl Sagan set about designing the Voyager Golden Record, he understood humanity’s first musical interstellar message was unlikely to ever be intercepted by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Nevertheless, he recognized that “launching this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” The same holds true for all future musical interstellar messages, even if our terrestrial melodies never grace an extraterrestrial ear.
“Don’t Believe a Word,” a new book by the Guardian writer and editor David Shariatmadari, delves into the riddles of language: the opacities, ambushes, dead ends, sudden ecstasies. It’s a brisk and friendly introduction to linguistics, and a synthesis of the field’s recent discoveries. So much more is now known about how language evolves, how animals communicate and how children learn to speak. Such findings remain mostly immured in the academy, however. Our “insatiable appetite for linguistic debate,” Shariatmadari writes, is born out of confusion. “Why do millennials speak their own language? Do the words they choose reflect the fact that they are superficial, lazy, addicted to technology? How can you protect a language against outside influence? Does the language we use to talk about climate change, or Brexit, change the way we think about them?”