She tries to come to terms with language by volunteering as an ESL teacher for adult students, but she can’t teach any of her students to say English words they just end up saying Spanish cognates with English endings. Selin seems to have never abandoned the mindset of a child just beginning to encounter language, and when she starts to study the theory and philosophy of language at Harvard, she grows ever more tortured by its mysteries. It’s the same kind of puzzled distance between self and speech that so many people experience during their first year of college, when you start to learn about semiotics and get your mind blown with the idea that language is a constructed system - or the distance that exists in very early childhood, when you are first learning how to talk. “I’m afraid I’ll accidentally eat it all before I get there,” she says of a box of chocolates, because she’s “following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn’t resist chocolate.” Then she spends the remainder of the school year defending Einstein to everyone who stops by her room and informs her that he is wildly overrated.Įven when Selin understands a code well enough to follow it, she’s hyper-aware of its presence. “‘A photograph of Albert Einstein,’ she said decisively,” in the manner of college students everywhere who want to demonstrate their erudition and whimsy, and who also feel that Monet and Klimt are too clichéd for them.īewildered, Selin buys an Einstein poster, but she gets one that just shows him in front of a chalkboard instead of the one her roommate obviously meant, where Einstein is playfully sticking out his tongue.
When her roommate instructs her to buy a poster, Selin asks what kind she wants. Selin is utterly baffled by the codes and linguistic nuances that college freshmen rely on to explain themselves. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
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