Babel No More (18 page)

Instead, the figure
at the door was draped with loneliness. His spirit seemed at times relaxed. At other times, subdued. You’d call him lost in the past if it wasn’t clear that he might be happier there. Lost in
the present would be better. “I definitely could have been a very good flagellant or Jesuit,” Alexander said. “I have a knack for studying with monastic discipline, as a form of trying to attain self-edification,”
he said. I’m not mocking him—here’s someone who’s living his dream, who bears its burdens, revels in its joys. On the first day I visited him, his wife was out of the house, and while we talked, his two boys, three and five years old, played quietly in the living room. When they popped in to watch, he smothered them with kisses and peppered them with questions in French, which they know
alongside English and Korean. They’re already writing Chinese characters in workbooks, which he—puffed with pride—showed me. That much, I thought, sounds like what a hyperpolyglot should do.

“I try to grab them and say, Let’s do some Latin together. They crawl all over me. I want them to share this. I don’t want to say, Get out, I’m working. I want them to be a part of it. I want to share it
with them as much as they can.

“I recommend that you have two boys, spaced two years apart. It’s ideal. I’m four years older than my brother, and we didn’t get along when I was younger. Whereas these two, they squabble occasionally but they’re really alike, they love each other, and you can see that. I just have one brother, Max, and you’ll meet him. He’s completely handicapped now. He was totally
normal until he was ten years old and he had a devastating brain disease and has been utterly physically and mentally handicapped ever since. My parents refused to put him in a home, so they just take care of him, and he’s a lot of work.”

I took a chance on the next question. “Is there any way in which your learning languages is some sort of response to that?”

He inhaled and sighed before taking
a long pause. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. But I think that perhaps doing it so compulsively as I do might be kind of a feeling that my brother, you know, basically lost his life, so maybe I have to do twice in this life to live my life and his.”

Such an intimate story I hadn’t intended to uncover, and certainly not so quickly; I felt as if I’d stumbled into a place I shouldn’t be. I used
to wonder why the figure of linguistic power, like a Mezzofanti, is so often compared to the native speaker of one language, when the more telling comparison is to the man abandoned by all words, reduced to
meaningless sounds. As I would discover, people who have lost their language to trauma or disease have made more contributions to the scientific understanding of language in the brain than
Mezzofanti and his brethren ever did. Here was that symbolic pair, the polyglot and the wordless man, in the brotherly flesh.

On many mornings, once Alexander has greeted the sun in his scriptorium, he goes for a long run in the arid hills of the park above his neighborhood, while listening to a German audiobook tape on his Walkman. (So far, he eschews the MP3.) Marathon lengths are easy for
him—once, he says, he got lost in the woods and ended up running more than thirty miles, though he felt faint. Later someone told him that long-distance runners have to eat every two hours, which came as a revelation; he finds the carbohydrate goo disgusting. He eschews that, too.

One morning, he discovered the campus of a theological seminary that he now covets for a polyglot academy he dreams
of starting. I asked him to show me, and on our way up the hill I learned that he doesn’t know how to drive—a point that will take on significance later.

The school was made up of low, Mission Revival–style buildings surrounded by redwoods and eucalyptus trees stirred by the wind. Alexander pointed to a fire trail cutting down the hill, saying that it would be good for shadowing. Shadowing is
how he gets to know a language’s sounds: put a tape in the Walkman and, while briskly walking and arms swinging, you shout the sounds as you hear them. Though you won’t know what the words mean, later you read the dialogues and translate them, then you shadow the same material again. For him, parsing the sounds first, then adding meaning later makes it stick. Shouting now is also an inoculation against
embarrassment later.

At first, I assumed that his ambition was to speak all of his languages—otherwise, what’s the point of shadowing? This turned out to be wrong. I also assumed that he might like to talk to people. That, too, wasn’t right. His goal is to read literature from all over the world, classic and contemporary, in the original languages. He had shown me a recent novel by a Dutch author.
“Reading this puts me in tune with the living spirit, the resonance of the language,” he’d said, waving the book, “not
being able to go to Amsterdam and go into a café and get a hash brownie and have them think that I’m one of them, not an American tourist.” He wants to explore his consciousness, to encounter a language as a living entity, and to collect the esoteric knowledge of these encounters.
“Most of the languages I’ve studied I’ve never spoken, and I probably never will,” he told me. “And that’s okay with me. That’s nice if you can do that, but it’s rare that you have an interesting conversation in English. Why do I think it would be any better in another language?”

As we walked around the seminary grounds, he pointed out a cloister, also a good space for shadowing. He cut the air
with his finger, imagining himself the school principal: here he’d put Korean, here Chinese, over there Japanese, letting students drift from area to area. He’d do this, he said, because he encounters languages not as finite, divisible things, but as fuzzy clouds. Labeling something “French” or “Italian” is a convenience, not a reflection of the reality he perceives. His students should have that
experience, too. What the rest of us call a “language” is, to Alexander, a minor variation on a broader linguistic theme. “For me to learn any Romance or Germanic dialect, just put me in the environment, and it would come alive,” he said. “It would be building upon thousands and thousands of hours of active conscious study of other languages.” Even if he were to set out today to learn a language
unrelated to one he already knows, he said, “I would have to put in fewer hours than compared to, say, you.”

A sunlit courtyard with a dry, cracked fountain at its center beckoned us to stop. “The way I see it,” he said, “there are three types of polyglots. There are the ultimate geniuses, the ones who are so rare, the ones who excel at anything they do, and one of those happens to be languages.

“There are people who are only good at languages, like Mezzofanti, for whom it comes very easily. Then there are people like me: we’re willing to work very, very hard, and everything we know, it’s because we’ve worked to get it. I would think those would be the people you’d be most interested in: what sort of strategies do they have that they can teach everybody else?”

Walking around next to
Alexander, I began to feel stupid, soft, and modern. I asked him what he thought of people who have only one language. I feel sorry for them, he replied. He maintains that every educated
person should know six of them. Informality makes him uncomfortable. He gets a lot of emails that don’t have formal salutations, which bugs him. The forum posts he doesn’t like because they’re not “scholarly.”
He admires figures of the Enlightenment who invented things, wrote poetry, made scientific discoveries, and learned lots of languages. That contemporary society lacks comparable polymaths he takes as a sign of civilization’s decay. Understandably, he has a hard time fitting in to modern institutions. As a graduate student, a professor told him that an ambition to learn more languages would mark him
as a dilettante, not a scholar. Decades later, that comment still stings Alexander so badly that he longs to prove that professor wrong.

Alexander Arguelles at Angkor Wat, 2011. (
Courtesy of Alexander Arguelles
)

As we got back in the car, I asked if he reads newspapers to practice his languages—I had imagined the hyperpolyglot to be someone conversant in the current events of a dozen cities.

“You know what the Greek word for ‘newspaper’ is?
Ephimerida,
” he replied. His prickliness surprised me.

“So, no,” I said.

“No.” He eschews
them, too.

Alexander sees himself as a rebel. Over there is the world, which drives people to specialize in ever-narrowing areas of knowledge. Over here is Alexander, who wants to embrace all literatures, all peoples. Yet he’s an
exemplar of the very trend he decries. Though he knows many languages, studying them is nearly all he does. For proof, look at how closely he’s documented every minute
of every deliberate encounter with a foreign language.

He pulled out a laptop on the neatened kitchen table and showed me how it works. Years ago, when he first started on his polyglot path, he wrote on paper in runes or Chinese characters; now he uses Excel spreadsheets and Arabic numerals. In one column go the scriptorium pages he’s completed; figuring fifteen minutes a page, he calculates
a total number of hours per language and language family, broken down by minutes per day—ask him how much German writing he’s done, and he can tell you in the blink of an eye (fifty-seven hours). He also accounts for reading narratives, listening to recorded books while running, doing grammar drills, reviewing, and shadowing. I noticed that he never talks about parts of language or the things that
delight him, and when I asked him if he has favorite vowels or verb structures or consonants, he seemed to be baffled. He talks purely in units of time, of labor. He’s like someone who loves food but discusses it mostly in terms of its calories rather than its flavors.

How much time are we talking about here? Over the last 456 days, according to Alexander’s spreadsheet, he’s spent 4,454 hours
(about 40 percent of the 10,944 hours of those 456 days) on languages, arranged in descending order by the total number of hours of study:

English—456 hours

Arabic—456 hours

French—357 hours

German—354 hours

Latin—288 hours

Chinese—243 hours

Spanish—217 hours

Russian—213 hours

Korean—202 hours

Sanskrit—159.5 hours

Persian—153 hours

Greek—107 hours

Hindi—107 hours

Gaelic—107 hours

Polish—102 hours

Icelandic—83 hours

Czech—57.50 hours

Serbo-Croatian—57.50 hours

Swedish—51 hours

Catalan—44 hours

Old Norse—40 hours

Italian—39.50 hours

Portuguese—37.50 hours

Turkish—34.75 hours

Japanese—30 hours

Romanian—26.25 hours

Ancient Greek—22 hours

Middle High-German—17 hours

Danish—17 hours

Anglo-Saxon—14 hours

Old French—14 hours

Afrikaans—12 hours

Norwegian—12 hours

Occitan Provençal—12 hours

Swahili—12 hours

Ukrainian—10 hours

New Norse—8 hours

Bulgarian—8 hours

Old Church Slavonic—8 hours

Hebrew—8 hours

Middle English—7 hours

Frisian—7 hours

Old High German—6 hours

Old Swedish—5 hours

Scottish Gaelic—4 hours

Manx Gaelic—4 hours

Welsh—4 hours

Breton—4 hours

Cornish—4 hours

Thai—4 hours

Indonesian—4 hours

Vietnamese—4 hours

He’s spent
from half an hour to three hours studying another sixty-seven languages. “I’ll probably never know Kazakh,” he said, “but I want to know what Kazakh sounds like. If I hear people speaking Kazakh on the street, I want to know, ‘That’s Kazakh.’”

I decided to meet Alexander’s father, Ivan, who might give me another perspective on Alexander’s youth. I expected someone gruff and distant, but when
he drove by to pick me up, I met a shaggy grandfather in his early seventies, his white hair cut with a dramatic set of bangs hanging over his round glasses; the overall effect was of a nearsighted sheepdog crammed into the front seat of a ’90s-era Toyota sedan. Alexander’s sweetness was recognizable in Ivan, who could also talk for hours about the ardent pursuit of languages if given the chance.

When Ivan and his twin, Joseph, moved to Minnesota from Mexico in the late 1940s, the other school kids mocked them: you’re not Americans, you’re Indians. To blend in, he stopped speaking Spanish. In the ninth grade, he fell in love with Latin—mainly because it so resembled Spanish, his Mexican father’s language. He and his brother were small-town
wild boys who cut romantic figures as jean jacket–wearing
toughs with sensitive, artistic sides. With each other, they were so brutally competitive that as teenagers, they had divided up the world, as if it were spoils of war: Ivan got poetry and languages, Joseph took the world of art, eventually getting a PhD in art history.
*
Ivan inhaled the Romance languages, finding French, Italian, and Portuguese material in the library, scouring stores for books
in Catalan and Provençal, finding
Colloquial Romanian
in a used-book store in Chicago. “I drove my mother crazy talking Romanian to her,” he said. A Latin major in college, he also took Ancient Greek, which led to Sanskrit, his jumping-off place for Hindi, Bengali, Sinhala, and Nepali, with a detour through Persian.
†
All, except for Latin, French, and Italian, were learned outside of classrooms.
He also knows German, some Old Scandinavian, Old Icelandic, Russian, Arabic, and some Chinese. “Alexander probably remembers me studying Sanskrit after my morning shower, a towel on my head,” Ivan said. It was easy to imagine him like that, a young Alexander hovering, invisible, at his elbow. Then I imagined Ivan in line at the supermarket, leaning on the cart and reading some foreign tome—when
he’s able to read in a language that way, he says, he really knows it.