On language

 What makes us feel superior to other species is our ability to use language and symbolic reasoning: if you weren’t human you wouldn’t be reading this. Language gives us the ability to count and calculate, remember and communicate exact measurements and quantities; it allows us to indicate objects not present at the time and even to describe objects and situations that do not exist; to determine cause and effect relationships, formulate and test hypotheses and so forth. Language allows us to develop and pass on procedures for making tools, clothing, shelter and other artifacts that allow us to overcome some of our physiological limitations. Taken together, all of this gives us the collective ability to outsmart animals much stronger, faster and physically more dangerous. But it is a double-edge sword: language also allows us to irradiate ourselves by building nuclear power plants which then melt down, to put ourselves at risk of immediate extinction by stockpiling thousands of nuclear weapons, and to threaten the existence of all life on the planet by poisoning the oceans and the atmosphere with products of our fossil fuel and chemical industries. In the final analysis, perhaps we, and all life on Earth, would have been safer if humans had not evolved language. Perhaps the use of knowledge that language enables, taken to an extreme, only allows us to achieve a higher overall level of suicidal stupidity.

There are some physiologically and cognitively normal humans who lack language: this is the usual result of not being exposed to language during the critical period in early childhood. Children are born with the ability to acquire language, or languages, that they are exposed to, and this happens to a large extent automatically. In some cultures, infants are spoken to constantly. In others, they are regarded as unimportant and uninteresting and largely ignored; their physiological needs are attended to, but little effort is expended in attempting to communicate with them. But the vast majority of them learn to speak anyway. Deaf-mutes spontaneously develop systems of home signs to communicate; if there is a community of deaf people (even of just two individuals) a language spontaneously develops among them in a phenomenon known as idioglossia. Twins sometimes develop a private language of sorts; this is called cryptophasia. In short, among us humans, language just happens.

This is not surprising, since we appear to be wired for it from birth. There is quite a lot of literature on so-called language universals, but it seems like a conflicted and vexed subject, more philosophy than science. The language universals that are obvious and non-controversial are very few. One is syllabification (i.e., babbling, something babies spontaneously do)—all oral, spoken languages consist of syllables, which consist of phonemes, which, in turn, consist of a vowel or a diphthong preceded and/or followed by one or more consonants. The second is the existence of things called words: there is a specific area of the brain (Wernicke area) that is responsible for handling vocabulary. Lesions in this area cause Wernicke’s aphasia: the tendency to confuse and forget words, and to lose the ability to perceive and convey meaning. The third is the existence of phrases: another area of the brain (Broca’s area) is responsible for arranging words together into phrases and sentences. Lesions in this area cause Broca’s aphasia which manifests itself as agrammatism: the tendency to scramble sentences and make grammatical errors. But most of the discussion about language universals seems to avoid these obvious universalities, and instead centers on the rather abstract matter of syntax. Noam Chomsky is the great Syntactician, the undisputed champion of Universal Grammar, but he has recently conceded that his creation is a mere potentiality that may not be realized in any given language.

The limits of language

What caused Chomsky to qualify his claim to linguistic universality was the recent research into Pirahã, a language spoken by a small group of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon. Pirahã is a highly unusual language: its form is so redundant that it can be either whistled, whispered or hummed without loss of meaning. It is grammatically quite complex, with many verb suffixes that can convey a wide range of meanings, but, most notably, it lacks recursion—the ability to say things like “This is the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.” Since recursion is considered to be a key element of Universal Grammar, this was taken by some to mean that Pirahã is not a complete language, possessing a finite set of possible phrases rather than an infinite set of possible sentences. Another notable feature is that in Pirahã the source of information is obligatorily marked with reference to known individuals using a specific set of verb suffixes. Taken together with the impossibility of saying something like “St. Matthew said that Jesus said that...”, this feature makes the Pirahã immune to proselytizing by missionaries: all of Scripture is automatically ruled inadmissible on a technicality. Lastly, the Pirahã lack the ability to count and, in spite of wanting very much to learn to use numbers, to avoid being cheated when trading with other tribes, have been unable to do so. They appear to have one word to signify quantity, which can mean both “few” and “many,” the gradation between the two being a subtle tonal difference. They can probably compute as well, their computations being analog rather than digital in form. In spite of these linguistic limitations, the Pirahã are a carefree, thriving little tribe, get on splendidly with each other and seem happy with their lot in life.

These recent discoveries concerning the Pirahã have revived arguments in favor of linguistic relativism, called Whorfianism, after its proponent, American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorfianism espouses the idea that linguistic categories determine cognitive categories (in its strong, by now thoroughly disproven version) or influence them (in its weak, still controversial version). There was already a lot of empirical support for the weak version before the Pirahã came along. Based on the presence of certain obligatory grammatical markers for distinctions such as number (singular/plural), tense (past/present/future), gender (male/female/neuter), direct/indirect speech, conditional, subjunctive, perfective/imperfective and so on, languages limit the ambiguity of utterances, and lend a certain automatic precision to both thought and expression. This is more of a statistical effect; if a language obligatorily marks hearsay, then people are more likely to distinguish hearsay from evidence in daily life. But even if it doesn’t, then people can still understand the distinction once it is explained to them, and act on it.

The strong version of Whorfianism has been disregarded more or less as a matter of general principle, because there is nowhere to draw a boundary around a language. Universal Grammar presupposes that the number of possible sentences in any language is infinite, and therefore each language is capable of expressing an infinity of meanings. Pirahã throws a monkey wrench into this logic. If one tribe of hunter-gatherers can happily get by with such an “incomplete” language, summarily dismissing all evidence that their language does not express, then language does in fact determine cognition in a directly observable, non-theoretical way. Furthermore, if there is one such language, then there can be any number of other such languages, dialects or idiolects out there as well, whose speakers are able to function biologically and socially while remaining blissfully unaware of the many things that torment our overburdened, overeducated psyches.

Moreover, it then starts to seem likely that languages, not in some abstract and timeless sense of their full logical potential, but in terms of actual utterances spontaneously uttered by their native speakers in response to each other and their environment, span a large range, from a fixed stock of phrases, as with the Pirahã, to the turgid and pedantic academic prose of linguistics journals. Introduce a linguist into the mix, however, and the situation changes: in attempting to elicit from native speakers responses that would be in line with the principles of Universal Grammar, the linguist changes the picture. Native speakers of most languages can be trained to produce responses in support of Universal Grammar, just as tigers can be trained to jump through blazing hoops, even though such tricks bear little resemblance to their behavior in their natural environment.

The Pirahã possess some ability to communicate with outsiders using a very limited subset of Portuguese. They make no attempt to learn Portuguese grammar, and simply use Pirahã with Portuguese words substituted. This type of language, known as a pidgin, develops spontaneously between groups that do not share a common language. Pidgins tend to be limited to a particular domain, such as trading, and lack expressive power. They are expressly incomplete, and nobody speaks them as their native language.

Except that sometimes groups of children learn to speak pidgin as their first language, in which case they have no choice but to turn it into a complete language. This process, which has occurred countless times, is called creolization, and the result is a creole language. The better-known contemporary examples include Haitian Creole (based on French) and Cape Verdean Creole (based on Portuguese), but, in fact, most Romance languages such as French and Spanish started out as creoles, derived from Latin-based pidgins that the conquering Romans used to communicate with the local tribes. English was incompletely pidginized and creolized in the aftermath of the Viking invasions and the Norman conquest, shedding a great deal of its grammar and replacing some 80 percent of its vocabulary with French, but retaining some irregular verbs and a few other grammatical vestiges that creoles typically lack. The process of pidginization and creolization results in the shedding of a great deal of grammar and vocabulary. Linguists are usually able to tease out examples to bolster claims that any given creole is a complete language. However, based on my own observations and experience, I am willing to say something that I am sure many people will find politically incorrect: in their actual daily use patterns, creoles can be quite limited. Creoles are simple, limited and easy to learn. In an environment where thinking complex, nuanced thoughts is a waste of precious energy, such spontaneously formed languages may be the right tool for the job.

In recent decades, thanks to rapid economic globalization, cultural homogenization and widespread penetration of the Internet, a new wave of pidginization has swept the world. The de facto contact language of the world is now Broken English. Throughout the world children are growing up hearing and speaking Broken English, and are spontaneously transforming it into various pidgins and creoles that they use among themselves. Some of them later learn a more complete version of English, but as the process of global economic decline accelerates, one should expect that such educational opportunities will dwindle, and that an assortment of English-based pidgins and creoles will appear in many parts of the world. To what extent these creoles qualify as complete languages—and to what extent their limitations affect the cognitive abilities of their speakers—will have to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Spoken memory

One of the most significant uses of language is for remembering narratives. All cultures have a tradition of storytelling, which can be as simple as the ritual of having one (usually older) person speak while a group of (usually younger) people listens, but it can also take the form of long epic poems set to music accompanied by dance or puppet theater or shadow play. (Shadow play is particularly efficacious; the puppets cost nothing to make, pack flat for travel, and the stage set-up consists of a curtain and a lantern, but the result, in skilled hands, is most impressive.) These are the forms in which cultural knowledge was transmitted from the old to the young. It may seem amazing to us today, but in pre-literate societies the experience of listening to such epic recitals was treated as extraordinarily significant, to such an extent that at least some of the audience would take the trouble of committing the entire text to memory, to recite it later.

With the appearance and spread of writing, the burden on memory was lessened. The stories were committed to paper instead of to memory. It is an unfortunate fact that paper is more perishable than memory; the oldest stories we have—the myths and the epic poems—had existed for thousands of years, passed down orally from one generation to the next, before they were written down. Silent reading, which is now considered the norm, was slow to develop, and for a long time the use of written texts was for reading them in public in spite of failing memory. Even when people were reading to themselves, they moved their lips. An ability which is not exercised tends to atrophy, and, not surprisingly, the ability to read and write has had a very significant deleterious effect on people’s ability to remember. Calculators and computers produce a similar effect on the ability to do mental arithmetic. Extensive use of spell checkers has largely erased people’s ability to write without the aid of a computer. The ease with which information can be retrieved by search engines has reduced the amount of information people retain. The pattern is always the same: start walking with a crutch—develop a limp.

A second deleterious effect of literacy is that it causes the amount of information to expand in wild profusion, without causing an increase in knowledge, because the people who have access to this information remember less and less of it. Bodies of law, scientific and other research and analysis, engineering specifications and the like force us to base our decisions on a corpus of knowledge that is now too big to fit into anyone’s head or to communicate orally in a finite lifetime. Most people no longer possess knowledge but merely convey information. The paradoxical effect of too much information is that everyone is forced to wallow in confusion and ignorance, growing more and more helpless. As technology improves, manual information-processing functions are automated, jobs eliminated, and we are left behind, our minds clogged with a disjointed collection of useless trivia.

Tribes that choose not to emphasize literacy and favor diligently maintaining an oral tradition realize many advantages. A system of justice based on a verbally transmitted codex and case law automatically limits the size of the legal system. Ignorance of a law, once it becomes sufficiently widespread, does become a valid excuse, and laws are discarded once they become sufficiently obscure. None of their precious resources are wasted on teaching children to read and write using an ancient and cumbersome orthography, or on maintaining and duplicating a body of written knowledge. When they enter into agreements, contracts or treaties, these are not committed to paper, making it easier to quietly cancel them once they outlive their usefulness.

During the recent decades much of our information (what we, perhaps mistakenly, continue to call “knowledge”) has been migrated to digital media: the progression has been from brain to paper to plastic. This plastic is rather long-lived: as minute particles of chemical waste, it persists in the environment for centuries. But its useful life is limited to just a few years. With plastic, the distinction between a useful product and a piece of trash depends on whether it is cracked, dented, scratched, or, in more and more cases, whether it has ever been used before. Information encoded in the form of microscopic magnetization spots or laser-etched pits on bits of plastic is not particularly durable, and untold reams of “knowledge” have disappeared without a trace because the media on which they were recorded can no longer be read. Even when the data are intact, there is an even bigger problem: information technology is a very power-hungry beast, its power generated largely from burning coal, natural gas and diesel, and from the decay of enriched uranium. It relies on scarce and quickly depleting ores, rare earths and other minerals, and depends on a steady supply of electricity, which is becoming a rarity in many parts of the world. It is also vulnerable to a very unpredictable but recurring sort of disruption: we are one large solar flare away from having our collective memory erased.

There is a danger that the long road from oral culture to written culture to digital culture will end with groups of humans helplessly clutching their dead smartphones, no longer knowing where they are, who anyone is or even where to have lunch. They have learned to cope with being bombarded with millions of bits of information every day, much of it meaningless or irrelevant, but remembering almost none of it, because, you see, there was no need: the information was always at their fingertips.

The best way to make a body of knowledge live on forever is to teach it to children. If it’s a story, set it to a rhythm, make it rhyme, give it a melody and a young mind will absorb it like a sponge and spontaneously reproduce it in its entirety—no rote memorization necessary. If it’s facts about the natural world that they need to learn, then venture out into it with them, have them smell and chew their way through it while learning what each plant is called, and they will associate the look, the smell, the taste and the sound into a durable synesthetic memory. Or you can let them spend countless hours playing with pencils and pieces of paper, staring at screens and pushing buttons, while learning very little beyond how to be helpless, physically useless and reliant on second-hand understandings and on technology that won’t be around for very long. We have the necessary technology right in our heads! Why don’t we teach our children how to use it?

The second best way to preserve a body of knowledge is to preserve it in a written form that children can be taught to read and write quickly and easily. The current English spelling does not qualify; it cannot be learned as a system, but can only be memorized as a set of idiosyncratic renderings of words that are only vaguely related to the way the words sound. This process of rote memorization takes some ten years of formal schooling—a ridiculous amount of time, considering that Italian or Vietnamese or Russian orthography can be learned in about two years. The rates of functional illiteracy in the English-speaking countries are already very high and heading higher. It is about time somebody addressed this problem by providing a workable alternative while the lights are still on and all the information is available in digital form. The solution is part linguistics, part software engineering and part running acid-free paper through a printing press.

THE FIVE STAGES of  COLLAPSE SURVIVORS’ TOOLKIT

Dmitry Orlov

Champollion

 And so Jacques throws himself into teaching his brother. He sets him riddles—

Why is the Chorus made up of old men in the first part of the Oresteia, why of slave women in the second, why of the Furies in the third? What is the secret?
He explains the subtle nature of language to him, how the dry rules of grammar can create a deep puzzle, choosing lines from the tragedies that turn in on themselves—

The living are killing the dead.
The dead are killing the living.

—in Greek a single phrase which expresses both meanings at once, the words themselves intertwining, as inseparable as the crimes of the past and present to which they refer.
More gifted than his hard-working brother, Jean François is able to remember long phrases and grasp difficult grammatical concepts after hearing them just once, astonishing Jacques with his facility. What his older brother has taken endless pains to learn, Jean François picks up with ease. He is a prodigy, Jacques quickly sees. When the older brother returns to Grenoble, he makes further sacrifices and finds the money for Jean François to be enrolled in school.
But if Jean François is an enfant prodigue, he is a temperamental one. He hates the discipline of his new school. He gets into fights with the other boys there every day. He becomes lazy and refuses to study anything. His head is filled with scenes from antiquity. Called upon to divide ten by two, to know the population of Figeac, to jump over a low hurdle, to spell his own name, he cannot.
Letters go back and forth between Grenoble and Figeac, between Jacques and Jean François, who appeals to his brother to let him live with him in Grenoble.
His brother answers, “If you want to come and live with me, you must study. An ignorant person can achieve nothing.”
The boy says he cannot study what does not interest him: It has no meaning for him. What he does care about, he devours, obsessed. He begins to see that the world was old even in the first centuries, with exhausted oracles and gods who have ceased to speak.
He becomes preoccupied with time, with first beginnings, an endlessly receding horizon. And before that? And before that? he asks his brother like a child—relentlessly—but also like a philosopher. And with these insistent questions, he begins to stumble upon his fate, the life’s work that will one day be his.
And before Christ?
The gods of Olympus, serene in beauty and power.
And before them?
Brutal monsters, the Titans—giants who howl with fear and rage as they devour their young.
And before that?
The earth and sky which for the Greeks always existed—but which the Hebrew God created from nothingness, from a single word, Yehee!, Let there be!, uttered in the darkness of endless night.
But still there is something before that, before the Greeks and Hebrews, something prior, preceding and half-forgotten like a dream or an hallucination: There is Egypt. Working his way back through the many moments in Egyptian time, first Arab, then Christian, Roman, Greek, Persian Egypt, Jean François arrives at the Egypt of the Pharaohs, dynasty after dynasty of rulers whose glory and splendor dazzled the world for millennia (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) before beginning to wane one thousand years before Christ. For when Athens was just a patch of rock-strewn ground and Jerusalem a crude Jebusite fortress; when Rome was a forest haunted by wolves, great pyramids and temples had already risen on the banks of the Nile.
The monuments, perfect in form and massive in size, are a measure of Egypt’s power. And the inscriptions with which they are covered are a measure of her wisdom: the writing which the Greeks call hieroglyphs, holy carvings, and which the Egyptians call “the words of the gods.” Fantastic pictures of walking jars and beasts with human bodies, a jumble of drawings: humpbacked vultures, squatting children, flowers and fruits, stars and palm trees and bald-headed priests, women giving birth, and male members spilling seed or urinating.
But what can they mean, these “words of the gods”? Their significance has been forgotten in the long course of time. “Speeches from the grave,” the hieroglyphs will be called even in Roman times when there are still a few old priests who understand them. “The language of the dead,” the Emperor Hadrian shrugs in the first century AD. But between “dying” and “dead” two centuries still remain and it is not until AD 394 that hieroglyphic writing, in use for more than three thousand years, is inscribed on a temple wall for the last time. And then silence descends: For fifteen hundred years the strange symbols stand as a puzzle and a challenge to all who see them. The cumulative experience and wisdom of a great civilization, they are a legacy—but only for the scholar wise enough to read them.
The young Jean François takes in the challenge, not yet seeing its connection to himself. This is the first moment of a great passion: The lover sees his beloved for the first time, but he does not yet understand his agitation. He sees the beloved and stands still in awe. There is no movement toward her, no declaration, no vow—no, the determined cry I will decipher the hieroglyphs! will come later. Jean François will not wait long, a few years, not more. When he is eleven he will take that step, too. For everything in his life takes place early, quickly, as if he knows that he has much to do in a short time. A bow that is tightly strung must be unstrung by midday will be one of his favorite quotations—from a pharaoh who also knew that he would not have many years to complete his desired tasks.
For the time being, though, it is enough that Jean François sees Egypt—and that he hears Egypt’s mysterious silence of fifteen hundred years. Aware of the challenge, he turns to other projects, work for which his immature skills are more suitable. His brother’s letters encourage him, exhort him not to be idle. He compiles a list of ancient peoples and then, still dwelling on origins, he compiles another list of famous dogs going back to the beginning of time. There is the dog of Odysseus and the dogs who devour the body of Jezebel and the “cynotherapists,” the dogs of the healing temples, the Asklepieions, who gently walk or lay among the afflicted . . .
Thusor of Hermione, a blind boy, had his eyes licked by one of the Temple dogs and departed cured  .  .  .
Thus, for Jean François the next years will be spent in study. In due course, his brother—finally!—will let him come to live with him in Grenoble although he never fulfills his brother’s requirements of “. . . first learning the simple, the necessary facts and practical skills—not the least of which is to write legibly!”
From the narrow winding streets of Figeac, Jean Fran-çois will be transported to a city two hundred miles away in which the snow-capped mountains can be seen on all sides. He will never see his mother again. She will die while he is learning Hebrew and Arabic and Chaldean, as well as Latin and Greek. For two years his brother will tutor him and then the next stage in his education will begin: the lycée.
Two contrary elements will be present from this time on. Two sign posts as contrary as east and west mark his way: the inevitable and the improbable.
For what could be more improbable than the fate awaiting him? What could be more far-fetched—who would have guessed it?—that a young boy living in a small French town would conceive a passion such as the one which consumes Jean François? Who could have known that the strange carvings covering the tombs and temples of Egypt—mere chicken scratchings to a philistine mind!—would make everything else pale in the life of Jean François?
But if it is a strange, a fantastic passion, it is also, like all great passions, an inevitable one. To understand this inevitability, though, to see how it came about, one must ignore external circumstances. The logic of Jean François’ development is an inner one. To understand, to be in sympathy with him, one must ask along with this young French boy—and with the same naïve wonder—And before that? And before that? And even before that? until one is standing in blinding light before a silent Egyptian tomb.

***
BUT IF THE world is dazzled by Napoleon, a certain unhappy, ridiculous, sublime—and vulnerable, very vulnerable—eleven-year-old schoolboy in Grenoble is not. Just the opposite: Jean François hates the military spirit sweeping France. He suffers from it. It oppresses him and makes him withdraw into himself, for it permeates every aspect of what he calls his “prison,” the lycée with its endless army-style parades and its Napoleon-worship.
Everyone in the lycée must conform—that is axiomatic in military life. Obedience and inflexible discipline dictate every detail, from how many jacket buttons must be done up and how many left undone, to the 526 books which make up Napoleon’s fiat on the curriculum: these and no others! It is a restraint terrible to a mind used to ranging where it likes. During Jean François’ first weeks he is discovered criminally hiding away a 527th—and a 528th—and a 529th. When the mattresses are restuffed with fresh straw, Persian and Arabic books come tumbling out, Latin poems, a list of Egyptian kings compiled by Manetho in Greek.
Word spreads like wildfire. The incident gives rise to laughter. The new boy is punished, not for hiding away the kind of books usually hidden in the straw—one of the very popular, scurrilous, and illustrated accounts of Marie Antoinette’s love life, for example; or a scandalous, lurid novel such as Diderot’s The Nun, the illicit writing of the day. No, Jean François is made to stand at attention all afternoon for an Arabic grammar and a Persian dictionary and a list of old kings!
For his difference, Jean François will have to endure a ridicule that he never forgets. And though he will later come up against mockery often enough, these early, childish griefs stay with him forever. Years later though occupied with his great work, he will sometimes recall them in letters. He recounts them in detail to his nephew, who leaves them out of his worshipful memoir. For though the schoolboy Jean François has amassed a great deal of precocious learning, still he is less mature than other children of his age and their laughter wounds an innocent nature formed by his solitary upbringing.
But, though his classmates laugh, the authorities take a more serious view. In the masters’ view, this hiding of respectable books reflects a rebelliousness, a dangerous independence—not merely a schoolboy’s forgivable prurience. By Napoleon’s orders, students are instructed under the most rigid constraints. For example, take the question Champollion is asked: What is the best form of government?
A universal state like the one Napoleon is creating. Everyone knows this answer. It is repeated often enough by every student—every student, that is, except for the brilliant yet stupid new scholarship boy. Jean François alone refuses to praise Napoleon when called upon in class. Even worse, he gives voice to his own opinions, quoting the classical authors on the tip of his tongue.
Champollion!
A long pause always follows after he is called upon, a silence that lasts forever, though he is self-assured intellectually. It is torture for him to speak in public. It is painful to fully emerge from his intense inner life. His mind, his consciousness is filled with sounds: First and foremost that is how he experiences the languages he studies. A torrent of sounds, soft or harsh, long or short, heavy or light, coming from the throat or the lips, rolled on the palate, or hissed from behind the teeth, combining and recombining like music. “If Arabic is the most beautiful of languages, then Persian is the sweetest, the Italian of the Orient.” Each language has a logic and a mystery all its own.
Champollion!
He stands awkwardly in his cracked shoes and the ill-fitting, secondhand uniform his brother bought him, facing the world: his twenty or so classmates.
What is the best form of government?
“The best form of government . . .” he begins, then pauses again. It is unbearable, excruciating. Taking his courage in his hands, he throws himself over the hurdle of his reticence, declaring as a shock goes through the room that he admires republics.
Republics? A few years before it would have been the correct answer, there would have been no other. As Talleyrand cynically remarks: “Treason is a matter of dates.” Now with Napoleon having assumed absolute power, such a response could cost Jean François his scholarship.
Not giving this a thought, though, Champollion goes on to explain why he admires republics—especially the ancient Roman one. He recites Latin epigrams on freedom and lines from Greek poems. His answer is half absurd with its abstruse references—and half sublime. Finally the astonished teacher recollects himself and interrupts with another question: “And what about the glory Napoleon has brought France?”
Again Jean François is ridiculous and sublime. Pale, struggling for breath—on the verge of fainting as is typical of him when he becomes excited—he quotes another classical author: “I love my country, but I love the truth more . . .”
The reply silences the teacher, and earns Jean François two zeros amid shouts of laughter, one for history and one for impudent behavior.
“There are certain incidents which affect the entire course of a student’s career in an academic institution,” Jacques tells his brother in a reproachful letter. “I have used all my savings and even so, I can barely pay half the costs of keeping you in the lycée. Without a scholarship, where would you be? I don’t mention the fact that your opinions will be attributed to me. And I don’t remind you that by your behavior . . .” But of course he is reminding him of what is at stake and he is mentioning every fact, every argument he can think of in his effort to make Jean François succeed.
But Jean François is stubborn. He will not, perhaps cannot, give in.
So the teachers quickly come to dislike the poor, arrogant boy with his flashing eyes and his precocious learning, his awkwardness in drill, and his indifference not only to the emperor, but to the great event of the week: the special Sunday dinner, sometimes of sausages, sometimes a fat capon. Even the way Jean François eats his meals makes a bad impression.
His trouble is that he is too much like the emperor he despises. The refusal to lose himself in Napoleon-worship could not be more Napoleonic. For like the emperor, Jean François is passionate, irritable, proud, sensitive, more than a little mad; a visionary.
When he starts to learn Coptic, the language of Egypt in the first centuries after Christ, he gives himself up to his studies so completely that not only does he compile a Coptic dictionary running over two thousand pages, but he himself becomes a Copt: “I think in Coptic,” he tells his brother. “I write my notes and keep my accounts and even dream in it.”
And when he studies Arabic, he is transformed. Not only are his inflections so perfect that he is indistinguishable from a native Arabic speaker, his voice changes so that even when he speaks French it takes on a throaty and guttural quality. “I barely move my lips when I talk.”
Later, this is what sets Jean François apart from other scholars: his emotional, libidinous, voluptuous relationship to ancient language. He is obsessed, driven, stalking his quarry not just with his mind but with all his instinct and passion.
For though his linguistic insights are based on solid scholarship, they are also acts of imagination. If he is a methodical, logical scientist, he is also a magician, a medium through whom ancient Egypt will speak, an artist who lives in the world of his inspirations and who sums up existence thus: “Enthusiasm alone is the true life.” Champollion writes the word in Greek letters, conjuring its original meaning: “possessed by the god.”
But how to survive in a state lycée when you are possessed by a god? If his artistic temperament serves him well in his work, it is an affliction in daily life. He feels every slight or constraint more keenly. The school’s routines drive him to despair. He lives for the hours when he can study his “beloved oriental languages” with the learned Abbé Dussert, a special dispensation Jacques has managed to arrange. They are his one joy. His need for these sessions is so strong as to be almost physical. Till the small hours, he pores over his grammars by the dim light of a courtyard lamp, holding the books up on the left side of his bed. The sight in his left eye will be permanently impaired from the strain. By day, he resists anything that takes him away from his languages, cursing the lessons in mathematics and technical drawing, the drills and inspections—“these stupidities.”
Hence his endlessly imploring letters to his brother:
“They are killing me with their orders of the day . . .
“I will surely sicken or lose my mind here . . . save me, I beg of you, before that happens . . .
“Set me free,” he writes Jacques week after week, month after month, year after year, astonishing letters when one considers that they are written by a young boy lamenting hours “stolen” from the study of languages. At the same time, though, he never forgets the sacrifices Jacques is making to keep him in school. More than that, these sacrifices are a sign of his brother’s faith in him, a faith which sustains him. He is ashamed, grateful, and furious all at the same time.
“You see everything through the eyes of a wild horse, as the saying goes: magnified times five,” Jacques admonishes. “How will you achieve anything in life if you are ready to die for no reason at all? Besides, I understand that Abbé Dussert is considering permitting you to add another language, either Chaldean or Syriac. Now will you be content?”
But of course Jean François is not content: “How can the Abbé make it a question of one or the other? Doesn’t he know I must study both? Doesn’t he realize”—etc., etc.
He finds a place to be alone. When the others are at meals, Jean François sits under the stairwell and reads Herodotus and Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, the Greeks and Romans who are Egypt’s heirs, and from whom he absorbs everything, whatever is known about Egypt and her gods—the divine vulture Nehkbet, the jackal-god Anubis, and Ra, god of the sun.
Alone in the courtyard of his school, hidden away in an empty classroom, Champollion reads a book in Latin (The Golden Ass) by the Greek, Apuleis, praising the Egyptian goddess Isis. He is in the middle of a description of how Isis appeared to author-narrator Apuleis in a vision. Apuleis had been turned into a donkey and had witnessed all the falseness and lusts of the world: the fakery of the eunuch-priests of Isis who take her statue on the road and swindle the people; and then the cruelty of thieves who ride the animal almost to death as they murder and rape. Finally, the donkey manages to eat a garland of roses offered to him by a beautiful nymphomaniac and suddenly he is human again and at the great temple of Isis, worshipping the goddess who has been welcomed into Rome by a people seeking something new: salvation.
“O heart that my mother gave me!” the ex-donkey begins an ancient Egyptian hymn.
“O heart of my different ages!” Apuleis cries out in the work Champollion is reading. And then a military drumroll is heard throughout the school, followed by an even harsher, more dream-destroying bugle call: ra-ta-ta! Another parade, another drill and inspection: Is the angle of Champollion’s hat correct? His back straight? Arms at the sides?
Darkness. Despair. The end of the world.
To put it in the words of his beloved Apuleis—that man-turned-donkey-turned-man-again by grace of Egypt’s gods—the problem is Et hic adhus infantilis uterus gestat nobis infantem aliem.  .  .  . This is a prophecy addressed to Psyche, to Mind, a young girl who has coupled with Eros or Love: Though you are still only a child, you will soon have a child of your own  .  .  .
Within Jean François, mind has also joined with passion. And though he too is young, he is heavy with intellectual child.

***
(...)
They meet by chance when the prefect comes to visit the lycée. A fateful chance, the ancient Egyptians would have dialectically called it because, despite the difference in their age and situations, it is impossible that two such kindred spirits should live in the same city and not know each other.
Fate throws them together in Grenoble and keeps them together forever. When they die, they will lie near each other under Egyptian-style monuments in the Père Lachaise cemetery. And even in the twentieth century, valleys named after them when the moon is explored will not be far apart.
What then was the teacher at the lycée thinking of that day? Did he imagine that by putting Jean François in the back row to hide his shabby uniform he could prevent the “Egyptian” prefect from noticing the “Egyptian” boy?
It is not just that Jean François knows something about Egypt. All the students have followed Napoleon’s campaigns, some have even heard firsthand accounts from relatives in the army of the battle of the pyramids, the Cairo uprising, and the siege at Acre. But Egypt has been Jean François’ imaginative home. When questioned by Fourier, not only does he answer, but he eagerly asks the prefect his own questions. He talks with intimate knowledge, ranging over place and time with such ease that finally Fourier can only exclaim, “Who has been in Egypt, this boy or me?”
Fourier invites Jean François—not the indignant teacher and not the distinguished head of the lycée—to visit him at the prefecture. Talking to the boy as an equal, as Champollion will later remember, he inquires in the polite language of the day whether Jean François will do him the honor of paying him a visit.
Then the prefect is gone and Jean François is alone in the lycée again—no longer a savant but a boy who cannot spell or do the simplest math problems and who has had the impudence to hold forth before such an important visitor. Of course this “unseemly self-display” will be forgiven later on when the learned societies and the lycée will fight to claim Jean François as their own, this student in a shabby uniform who did not even have the manners to thank the prefect for his invitation—disgraceful!—who did not have the sense to take Fourier’s extended hand but stood unsmiling, staring and speechless, self-conscious and overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed or not, Jean François accepts Fourier’s invitation and so it comes to pass that the two sit closeted together in the prefect’s office. The meeting will be a turning point in Jean François’ young life. (...)

IN FOURIER’S STUDY, Jean François wanders among the ancient objects covered with writing. He sees a fragment from a young man’s coffin, late, from the Roman period. His portrait has been painted, in encaustic: the pigments burned into the wood, on a gilded mask meant to cover his mummy. The youth’s black hair is a thick tangle of rough curls falling over his forehead, the barbarian style fashionable in the first century AD. His eyes are large and staring. Sparse beginnings of a beard cover his downy cheeks.
Next to him is another Roman-period coffin, a complete one of lime wood with a young girl portrayed on the mask.
Her cheekbones are high, her skin a warm pinkish apricot. Her white mantle and her jewelry—three gold snake bracelets—have been carelessly painted. From the left, light falls on her young face with its melancholy expression. Thick, red lips, a half frown. Large dark eyes look sadly to a point beyond the viewer. A garland of rosebuds encircle dark hair pulled back with a severity more in keeping with an older face.
Around the sides of the coffin and on the sides of the headrest under the girl’s neck, spells have been painted in brilliant colors, hieroglyphs invoking the gods of Egypt. Soon, in two centuries, they too will undergo the oblivion of death, their altars covered with sand or usurped by monks living in the desert.
Running his hand over the writing, Jean François asks the prefect if anyone knows what it means. Fourier shakes his head. A stone has been found in the course of reinforcing an old fort at el-Rashid (Rosetta)—an ancient decree written in both hieroglyphs and Greek. But the meaning of the hieroglyphs is still as obscure as the spells painted on the young girl’s coffin.
“Then I will be the one!” Jean François declares with a fervor Fourier will never forget. “I will decipher the hieroglyphs . . .”
***
Between that strangled, gluttonous cry and Alexander the Great’s pronouncement, To the strongest! lie two thousand years and a babble of languages echoing all the way back to the Greek carved on the Rosetta stone. This is the real prize of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, this paean of praise for Ptolemy V Ephiphanes “Who pardoned those who had been arrested and who were in prison, and every person who had committed whatever crime long ago; Who gave grain to the god-houses yearly; Who took care to send infantry and cavalry and ships to drive back those who came to fight against Egypt from the sea coast as well as from the Great Green . . .” This near-miraculous find will help open the way to the decipherment. When the British triumph over the pathetic, dwindling troops Napoleon has left to languish in Egypt, they demand the stone as part of the French surrender.
General Menou will not agree to this. Negotiating the surrender, he gives in to almost all their terms except the “theft” of the stone. Day after day, week after week, he uses all kinds of ruses and stratagems to retain it: hiding it, denying its existence, even insisting that it is his “personal property.” When he finally fails, he weeps openly as he hands it over. The French soldiers bitterly curse and swear at the victors carting it away. At every moment, a British officer reports, he fears that they will be attacked.
This is not the end of the matter: The inscriptions on the stone have been copied. Its gray surface has been covered with boot black (for lack of printer’s ink) and pressed onto sheets of paper: the emperor’s gift to the linguist.
The British may have the stone. On the side of it they arrogantly chisel the date and the fact of their victory. Theirs, however, is a victory that will be snatched away. This is the linguist’s gift to the emperor: for when twenty-three years later, after twenty-three years of unremitting toil, Champollion finally succeeds in its decipherment, he will reclaim its glory for France.
True, by then it is a gift to a dead man, to an emperor who had perished on a small, barren island; to an ex-general whose body is laid naked on a billiard table and eviscerated as a hurried autopsy is performed.
Like the copies made of the stone, a death mask is made of the Emperor’s face: a plaster impression of his features. That famous silhouette—through the memories and ideals it conjures—will continue to command.
***
Love, friendship, rebellion; then “a certificate of study and conduct” from the lycée. At sixteen, Jean François is ready to face the world, which he does suddenly, by surprise, five days after his graduation.
With more brotherly pride than wisdom, Jacques has decided to risk his own reputation and Jean François’ self-esteem, arranging for him to deliver a paper before the Académie delphinale. But why he should have chosen this particular setting for Jean François’ debut is a mystery. Jacques knows the conservative, skeptical nature of the academy’s membership, distinguished scholars and diplomats, scientists and mathematicians who are rigorous and critical and severe. Called away from their own work, they expect to be rewarded with discourse that is extraordinary. This is the raison d’etre of the Académie.
Jacques knows the idea of a young student presenting a paper here will astonish everyone. Regardless of what Jean François has to say, there is something to provoke ridicule simply in the fact of a sixteen-year-old lecturing established scholars, authorities in their respective fields. Jacques knows that a failure elsewhere could be shrugged off by his brother, but that here it will publicly humiliate Jean François. Yet Jacques goes ahead with the scheme.
There is a practical consideration, perhaps. Young men are being drafted daily, their ages younger and younger as Napoleon’s soldiers die on battlefields and must be replaced. But if a success would help Jean François receive a military exemption, why here, precisely where success is hardest to achieve?
Later Jacques will say that he had followed the progress of his brother’s ideas and decided that he was ready. Ready for what, though? Intense scrutiny of ideas which are just beginning to germinate? Examination of a judgment which is not yet mature? An ordeal?
It is true that by the time Jean François finishes at the lycée, he has already sketched out his plans for a work on Egypt, but this is an early attempt. Modestly giving it the title Essay on the Geographical Description of Egypt Before the Conquest of Cambyses (the Persian conquest), Jean François brings all his research to bear on a single question: the place names of ancient Egypt, its cities, rivers, oases, provinces . . .
Jacques feels the work is defensible. Actually, not only is the essay defensible, it reflects masterful scholarship, the control of an enormous amount of material woven into a coherent, thought-provoking whole.
Rather, it is an essay that would be defensible, if the young Jean François remembers to stay within its limits, if he is careful not to improvise or get carried away—dangers against which Jacques has cautioned his brother. But try to preach discretion to an enthusiast. Tell a moth to avoid the flame or Icarus to be wary of the sun . . . Jacques is pissing against the wind.
And so, five days after his graduation, the young scholar appears at the Académie delphinale. He is introduced briefly—what is there to say about him, after all? Striding up to the podium, he begins to speak.
He is brilliant. In a tour de force, he analyzes scores of Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Coptic Egyptian place names; sometimes they are translations or paraphrases of older, pharaonic names; sometimes, more rarely, they contain elements of the original language (the Coptic names especially). These are sounds that have survived thousands of years since last spoken as part of the ancient, forgotten language. Distorted, changed, combined with other languages, missing letters, endings (phonetic decay)—they nevertheless provide hints and suggestions, which Jean François explores in speculative asides.
Taking a first step out of the charmed circle of the defensible, he continues on his dangerous path by predicting that whatever ancient Egyptian has survived in Coptic will provide an important clue in the decipherment of the hieroglyphs.
Of course it must be remembered, he continues—proceeding in the self-contradictory, dialectical way characteristic of all real thought—that from antiquity on, the hieroglyphs have been described as a silent, symbolic language: each image representing an idea, a word, an allegory. There are far too many hieroglyphs to represent an alphabet, far too many to represent sounds . . . hundreds (in Ptolemaic times, thousands). Yet Coptic words, Coptic sounds are and will be crucial. Just why and how this is, he does not yet know and cannot yet explain.
Jean François, though deep in his studies, is still far from tackling any of the new inscriptions brought back to Europe by Napoleon’s savants, a wealth of writing, both papyri and statues and prolific copies made from vast temple walls and many-chambered tombs—Denon’s the most important among them.
It is an embarrassment of riches, in addition to which—most tantalizing of all—there are the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, the three scripts which have been studied unsuccessfully by linguists across Europe. In fact, the experienced authority Silvestre de Sacy, the decipherer of the Sassanid Persian inscriptions at Naqsh-i-Rustam, a man who will soon be one of Jacques’ mentors in Paris, has opined that in the present state of knowledge, decipherment of the hieroglyphs is impossible.
Perhaps one day, perhaps by chance, de Sacy believes, success will be achieved. But only by chance, only because of some lucky find, some fortuitous discovery that brings to light material not yet known. Until that time, declares this eminent professor of Persian and Arabic, this scholar well-versed in Coptic, the quest is futile.
This pronouncement Jean François completely rejects though he cannot yet say why. Seeing Jacques bury his face in his hands, he tries to circle back to the problem of Shunet es Zebib—the name for a fortress at Abydos meaning Storehouse of Raisins in Arabic. The same sounds appear in classical authors (predating the Arab conquest) and which must therefore . . . Mid-sentence Jean François stops. He has finished.
“I listened in the silence to my beating heart,” he later remembers. The young linguist stands alone and exposed. He has no idea that, after the first shock of surprise is over, this silence will give way to loud acclaim. Or that in the next moment, surrounded by admirers, he will become the youngest member of the Académie delphinale.
***
Years later, when Napoleon’s stolen books find their way back to the Vatican library, the scholar Sir William Gell will relate, “I think there are few Coptic books in Europe he [Champollion] has not examined. A friend of mine told me there is no book in the Vatican in that language, that has not remarks of Champollion in almost every page, which he made when the manuscripts were at Paris.”
Jean François devotes himself especially to his Coptic although, after all, what is it? A patois, a jargon written in Greek letters, a jumble of words spoken by a people who, conquered again and again, had forgotten not only the classical form of their language but even their own script. Moreover, a patois that has itself gone out of use a thousand years before Jean François takes up its study!
Replaced by Arabic after the Arab conquest, Coptic becomes an echo of an echo, a memory of a memory: a vernacular, a slang, a debased language gradually dying into silence. Its tones, inflections, its expressions are all reduced to a fixed liturgy of “corrupted” words and a few crates of books in the National Library—books looted by a visionary general and pored over night after night by a feverish boy!
His theory that Coptic still bears some affinity to ancient Egyptian is still an unproven theory, little more than a guess, as Jean François knows. And even supposing that it is a remote descendant of the ancient language, how changed it must be—another problem. How many centuries separate Coptic from ancient Egyptian—and how many foreign conquests, how many foreign words and sounds and scripts have been interposed between the two.
Still Jean François persists in his study, going through crate after unopened crate, cutting through twine and breaking the military seals affixed in Rome. Reading through the night, his voice echoes in the empty library, for he reads out loud, a habit picked up from the ancients for whom the written word was not silent but filled with sound. ... THE WATCHMEN GET to know him. They see him, hour after hour, as they make their rounds. Even their dogs, Jean François writes his brother, no longer growl.
This, then, is how the young man spends his nights in Paris.
***
A CARETAKER KNOCKS on the door but is sent away. Since coming to Turin, Champollion has been so forgetful of his appearance and surroundings that the servants have begun to whisper that he is not quite right. The scroll before him has not yielded its meaning easily: The complex writing presents endless difficulties, endless exceptions to principles he himself had discovered earlier, when he had made his great breakthrough.
He had been going along in the path which had been trod by scholars struggling with the hieroglyphs since the Renaissance, when suddenly he understood: first one word, then two, then the principle, the key which unlocked the mystery.
Half-mad then with excitement he had run through the streets of Paris to the library where his brother worked. Holding his tattered notebook out to the astonished Jacques, he shouted, “Je tiens l’affair! (I’ve done it!)” Then he fainted, falling into a coma and lying unconscious for eight days, more dead than alive.
From the first announcement of his discovery, it is fiercely disputed; the British especially cover him with scorn and fiercely contest his findings. Champollion’s theories are contrary to the ideas held about hieroglyphics from the earliest time, ideas which he himself had espoused until, in a moment of inspiration, all his years of study, all the concentrated effort of a lifetime, bore fruit.
The challenge now is proving what he knows. The first basis for Champollion’s conclusions had been the Rosetta stone, but this monument was not enough to refute his critics. True, the stone was inscribed both in hieroglyphic and Greek and by comparing the scripts, one could arrive at certain possibilities. But the inferences drawn from the stone are still only educated guesses, mere clues and theories.
First, the Greek and Egyptian writing on the stone are paraphrases of each other. They give the general meaning of the decree, and are not word-for-word translations. Also, the writing on the stone is dismissed by the experts as providing too small a sample to conclusively prove any theory. It contains only fourteen lines of formal hieroglyphs: a slender basis for Champollion’s claim that he can read the hieroglyphs.
The brilliant Englishman Thomas Young, physicist, physician, amateur classicist, had briefly studied the stone. He made a limited but important contribution to its decipherment before giving up. A wealthy and sophisticated scholar with a broad range of interests, Young makes Champollion, with his lifelong devotion to this one mystery, seem like a crank. Champollion, holed up in a cheap rooming house in Paris, lives for one reason and for one reason alone: the hieroglyphs.
From this obscurity, Champollion announces to the world that he can read them. Young, writing at ease from a fashionable seaside resort, gives his verdict: “Champollion is wrong.”
The burden of proof falls on Champollion. But in the time which has passed since his great discovery, physical ailments ravage the obsessed scholar. Intense intellectual effort and the struggle with poverty have taken their toll on the slender, handsome young man, prematurely aging him.
The race to confirm his discoveries is also a race with death, whose presence Champollion is not allowed to forget as he studies funerary papyri, coffin texts, and ancient dirges.
The question is, will Champollion’s discoveries be his “calling card on Immortality,” as he has put it in a letter to his brother, or will his work be dismissed as the egotistical ravings of a madman?
***
THE DECIPHERMENT BEGINS with a handful of “letters” thrown down on a page of Jean Francois’ notebook—Ptolemaios, the Greek form of Ptolemy, next to the eight hieroglyphs encircled in the cartouche on the Rosetta stone: if the cartouche is encircling a foreign name, it stands to reason that these eight letters must spell Ptolemy:
Not only Champollion but Young had been working on the problem of the foreign names—or rather, the foreign “name” on the Rosetta stone, for there was only one of them, “Ptolemy.”
Of the eight letters, Young got five of them right, but more important than conjecturing the value of a letter more or a letter less was Champollion’s overall approach.
At this point, both men assume that only the names of foreign kings would have to be written with an alphabet in Egyptian. How else but phonetically could Ptolemy or Berenike or Xerxes or Darius, etc., be recorded?
The principle for indicating such sounds might be like that of a “rebus,” Jean François conjectured. It would be as if when writing the English word “seer” one used a picture of the sea plus an “ear.” Or as if “seersucker” was jotted down—as in a seersucker suit—by joining a bearded sage to a fool scratching his head—a sucker—and so on, using fertile, inventive combinations for every contingency.
Or, Champollion also opined, these special cases where phonetic writing was required might use the “acrophonic” principle—a “rabbit” for the letter “r,” a door for the letter “d,” etc.; the initial sounds of a word being indicated by its picture.
Apart from these foreign names, though, the pure hieroglyphs “depict the ideas and not the sounds of the language . . .” as Champollion puts it.
This far, there is general agreement. But Egyptian script is another matter. The script had been thought to be a different form of writing from the “pure” hieroglyphs, and what’s more an alphabetic or phonetic one.
On the Rosetta stone, the Egyptian section made use of both hieroglyphs and “demotic” script, the latest and simplest form of cursive Egyptian. And there are also two other Egyptian scripts (not used on the Stone): the so-called “hieratic” or priestly script; and linear hieroglyphs, both simplifications of the detailed carvings and paintings on tombs and monuments. For example, oldman in its four forms:
Now while Young never learned to distinguish between “demotic” and “hieratic” and probably never even realized that linear hieroglyphs existed, Champollion immersed himself in the scripts obsessively. Going back and forth between them, he finally came to realize that all four forms of writing operated on the same principle. Therefore, the scripts—like the pure hieroglyphs—could not be phonetic since the pure hieroglyphs were not. They were not an alphabet.
Champollion became so expert in recognizing the correspondences between the scripts, that he would transcribe words, whose meaning he still did not know, back and forth from cursive to hieroglyph and from hieroglyph to cursive, until, like Coptic, it became second nature to him.
This fluency in the scripts—along with his deep knowledge of Coptic—gets him over his next and perhaps most formidable hurdle. But before he can take that leap, first there is a vital piece of the puzzle which Fate or Chance must supply.
For up until this point, the eight letter/hieroglyphs which have been deciphered from the name of Ptolemy are only guesses or conjectures. In order to proceed according to sound linguistic principles, Champollion needs to cross-check them against a second ancient source. And like the Rosetta stone, this second source—whatever it might be—must contain a known, foreign royal name other than Ptolemy—yet containing some of the same letters.
Even as Jean François wrestles with this problem, this second ancient source—a gift of the gods—has finally, after endless difficulties and delays lasting more than a decade, reached England.
***
LATER, CHAMPOLLION WILL write of the hieroglyphs: “It is a complex system, a writing that is pictorial, symbolic and phonetic at one and the same time, in a single text, a single phrase and even in a single word. Each of these types of character aids in the notation of ideas by different means: It is a code.”
As he refines his understanding, he identifies many different aspects of the writing. “Determinatives”—for example, non-phonetic indicators as to what order of being a word belonged. So that a hieroglyph to which a small bird was added (a determinative) took on a negative or evil or sickly connation; whereas that same hieroglyph with a small flag would indicate divinity. A wavy line was the determinative for liquid; a phallus emitting liquid, procreation; a forearm with a stick, force—and so on.
Champollion will work with hapax legomena (words connected to a specific time or subject, such as our “Watergate”). He toils over foreign words, Aramaic or Hebrew, embedded in Egyptian. He suffers the agonies of the damned deciphering ancient classics which only existed in the careless practice copies of schoolboys.
In defense of his decipherment, he will travel to Egypt and find hundreds upon hundreds of examples of writing to prove his discovery—which, like every great discovery, must go against tenaciously held ideas. Like Columbus, who was forced to controvert known fact, Champollion rejects the givens of the linguistic world, and presents a far-fetched theory of an ancient language endlessly complicated and rich and subtle: “visual poetry,” he will call it, an interweaving of thought and image, of writing and sound.
But first—before he does any of this—he must run through the streets of Paris to tell his brother. And then he lies in a faint, in a coma. For eight days, he remains in a drugged dream.
After all, how can he bear it? It’s a wonder it doesn’t kill him! How can anyone bear such joy?
***
HONORS ARE BESTOWED upon Champollion from all sides. The pope, the French king, learned societies, universities, all extol his achievement. But Champollion views such praise only as a means to an end. Having the ear of the world, he can plead for more care in the excavation of the ancient sites of Egypt. Funds are made available for an Egyptian wing in the Louvre. A chair of Egyptology is established in the University of Paris.
There is still much work to be done, many mysteries of the ancient language to be unraveled. Yet with Champollion’s decipherment, knowledge of our shared past is extended to include the long-silent millennia before Christ.

CHAMPOLLION RETURNS TO France from his researches in Egypt in the dead of winter. Perhaps with Drovetti’s connivance, his boat is made to remain in quarantine outside of Marseille an extraordinary forty-two days. Not longer after, Champollion, at the height of his powers, dies at forty years of age.
His brother spends the next three decades editing and posthumously publishing his work.

The LINGUIST and the EMPEROR
NAPOLEON and CHAMPOLLION’S

QUEST to DECIPHER the ROSETTA STONE
Daniel Meyerson

Politics and the English Language

 

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language – so the arguments runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influences of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa).

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction to proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervour on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet.

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream – as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless, bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power. and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changeson, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, rift within the lute, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien régime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.1 The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking’ in meaning.2 Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding features of Mr X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3, above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing – no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective consideration of contemporary phenomena’ – would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry – when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech – it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting-pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning – they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another – but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are obbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright,’ I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: ‘(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write – feels, presumably, that he has something new to say – and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence,3 to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot,Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Horizon, April 1946; Modem British Writing ed. Denys Val Baker, 1947, S.E.; O.R.; C.E.

George Orwell