The Last Samurai (6 page)

concentration. ‘But unlike the terrible and lonely giant of the sixteenth century, he was a man of infinite charm, a brilliant and witty talker, fond of conviviality, aristocratic in demeanour, a good husband and father, a first-rate

enneakaitessarakontasyllabic PENTEKONTASYLLABIC

heiskaipentekontasyllabic

organiser, endowed with an unparalleled talent for creating rapidly and with ease.’

And Cézanne? Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French painter of genius, associated with the Impressionist

treiskaihexekontasyllabic

school of painting. He was inarticulate: people called him the Bear. He worked very slowly and with

oktokaihexekontasyllabic enneakaihexekontasyllabic

HEBDOMEKONTASYLLABIC

difficulty. He is most famous for his landscapes and still lifes. His method was to apply blocks of paint to the canvas, often with a palette knife rather than a brush. He worked so

heptakaihebdomekontasyllabic

slowly that even fruit could not

OGDOEKONTASYLLABIC

stand still enough: it rotted

What’s the longest word in the world?

I don’t know. I don’t know all the words in the world.

What’s the longest word you know?

I don’t know.

How can you not know?

I think it’s the name of a polymer. I can’t remember how it goes.

duokaiogdoekontasyllabic

Wait a minute. Here’s a good one. di(2-ethylhexyl)hexa-hydrophthalate.

Is that the polymer?

No.

What does it mean?

I once knew.

My dad would know.

The hell he would (think I)—I would like to say this but I don’t KNOW that he doesn’t, there is only an (in my opinion) overwhelming likelihood, & I think I should not blacken his name to L without good hard evidence.

He MAY know. It didn’t come up in the conversation.

What did you talk about?

I talked about the Rosetta Stone. He talked about his car and about a writer he admired.

What kind of car does he have?

He didn’t say. Diethyl-dimethyl methane. Diethyl-diethyl malonate. Diethyl-methyl-ethyl malonate.

treiskaiogdoekontasyllabic tessareskaiogdoekontasyllabic pentekaiogdoekontasyllabic

before he was done. He used

oktokaiogdoekontasyllabic enneakaiogdoekontasyllabic

ENENEKONTASYLLABIC

wax fruit instead.

And who was Rilke and who was Zweig and who was Musil? Who was Newton and who was Einstein? Rilke

Why don’t you teach me the syllabaries?

WHY DON’T YOU TEACH ME THE SYLLABARIES?

WHY DON’T YOU TEACH ME THE SYLLABARIES?

Well

Are they hard?

Not very

Please

Well

Please

I told you the deal

Heiskaienenekontasyllabic duokaienenekontasyllabic

Glenn Gould (eccentric, brilliant mid-20th-century Canadian pianist and specialist in the works of J. S. Bach [18th-century German

HEPTAKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC

composer of genius]) said of The Well-Tempered Clavier [forget it], that the preludes

OKTOKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC

were merely prefatory

ENNEAKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC

and of no

HEKATONTASYLLABIC

real musical interest. The

You could teach me ONE syllabary

I told you the deal

Is there a language with only one syllabary?

I think Tamil makes do with one

So Tamil would be a monosyllabaric language

Yes

And Japanese is a disyllabaric language but most people would call it bisyllabaric

Yes

trisyllabaric tetrasyllabaric pentasyllabaric hexasyllabaric

reader

heptasyllabaric

may

oktasyllabaric

take comfort

enasyllabaric

in a plain

dekasyllabaric hendekasyllabaric dodekasyllabaric

preface.

hekkaidekasyllabaric

I will hope to do no worse by

heptakaidekasyllabaric

OKTOKAIDEKASYLLABARIC

ENNEAKAIDEKASYLLABARIC

EIKOSASYLLABARIC

heiskai

You’re missing a masterpiece of modern cinema. Finish the
Odyssey
and I’ll teach you the hiragana, yes?

Done.

Emma offered me a work permit & a job.

I said: Done.

I never meant this to happen. (L is reading
Odyssey 5
. He has read four books in four days. I would carry on from where I left off but I have misplaced my notes.) What I meant was to follow the example of Mr. Ma (father of the famous cellist), who I read somewhere started teaching Yo Yo when he was 2.

Coupez la difficulté en quatre was his motto, which meant that he would reduce a piece of music to a number of very small short tasks; the child was to master one task a day. He used the same procedure with Chinese characters, the child learning a character a day—by my reckoning that makes two simple tasks but you get the picture. I thought that this would be an enormous help to L for very little trouble to myself, & when he was 2 I started him on flashcards.

I think that the first simple task was supposed to be cat. No sooner had he mastered this simple task than he wanted to go on, he wanted every single word in his vocabulary on a card, he sobbed PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE when I tried to stop before writing it down. The next day he started his first book,
Hop on Pop
by Dr. Seuss, no sooner had he started than he started to cry because he did not know Hop and Pop. I saw in a flash that the time required to teach a two-year-old workaholic by the look-and-say method would leave perhaps 6 minutes a day for typing, & so (doubting my ability to make ends meet on 55p a day) I hastily went over a few principles of the phonics system. He learned to say huh when he saw an h and puh when he saw a p and by the end of the week he could read as follows: Hop. On. Pop. The. Cat. in. the. Hat.

I thought: It worked! It worked!

He would sit on the floor and when he found something interesting he would bring it over to show me.

Thunder of tiny feet. He had unearthed a treasure. Yes? I would say

And he would produce from the page—O Joy!—a thing of glory

Wonderful!

And here was another find! What could it be? Could it—No—Yes—
Yes
—It was a

And he would pluck from the page one marvel after another, until at last he could nonchalantly draw now a rabbit, now a dove, now a string of coloured scarves from an ordinary empty black top hat.

Wonderful marvellous wonderful marvellous cool

I was not getting as much work done as I had hoped.

One day it occurred to him that there were quite a lot of other books on the shelves.