Fish out of water

On Tuesday of this week my ulpan class was canceled, so I took advantage of the free day to go to Jerusalem and take care of some business at the Hebrew University. Keeping in mind the wise advice I received from Carly and Muse, I did my best to put the Hebrew I have been learning to good use, undeterred by my frequent mistakes and the many gaps in my vocabulary. (My Hebrew is a little like the amusingly ridiculous French used by Mark Twain's traveling companions in The Innocents Abroad: "Monsieur le Landlord – Sir: Pourquoi don't you mettez some savon in your bedchambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it? … Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice. Savon is a necessary de la vie to anybody but a Frenchman, et je l'aurai hors de cet hôtel or make trouble." Twain prudently cautioned his companions against this kind of communication on the grounds that it was so mixed up no one could possibly make head or tail of it, but they said the Frenchmen could understand the French and "average the rest." That's my philosophy too, especially in Israel where most people speak at least ktzat [a little] English.) Whether talking to taxi drivers, buying a cup of coffee, or asking for directions on campus, I tried to use Hebrew as much as possible. In good Zionist fashion, I have even taken to signing my name in Hebrew on credit card receipts. The most challenging test of my language skills came at the end of the day when a taxi driver who spoke very little English kept insisting that I should let him drive me all the way to Tel Aviv instead of Jerusalem's Central Bus Station. And he called me difficult! ("Atah kasheh.") After he dropped me off, I stood outside the bus station in the rain for what seemed like an eternity waiting to get through security, roamed around inside till I found the right bus, and finally settled in for the one-hour ride back to Tel Aviv. Wanting to make good use of the time, I started reading Marcel Fournier's new biography (in French) of Emile Durkheim. By the time I got home Tuesday night, I was not just physically weary, but mentally weary from all this thinking and speaking and reading in other languages.

Social reality, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote, exists twice, "in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside of agents. And when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in water’: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted." Linguistically speaking, I like being amphibious. I'd like to be more so. But when I speak or read Hebrew or French, especially after a long day, I feel the weight of the water. On Tuesday night, that weight was starting to feel a little heavy, and I missed the effortless ease and weightlessness of my first language.