The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  Life is words. It is Heraclitus’s pun on bios as life versus the bios that, differently accented, means the death-dealing blow. It is that life is an anagram of file, which can be a spice mix, an abrasive tool, a row of people or objects, or a place where words can be collocated on a computer or in a paper folder. Car is a yellow Matchbox toy with flappy doors, but automobile brings to mind insurance companies and roadside assistance, backup. I feel emotion stir when I’m choosing whether to say word list or lexicon, catalogue or litany. My heart is in the choice between the fleet and all the ships.

  When I say that last, I’m thinking of Sappho’s sixteenth fragment. The poem opens “Some say an army of horse and some say infantry / and some a fleet of ships is the most beautiful thing / on the black earth, but I say it is / whatever each one loves.” An army of ships, a collectivity of ships, a fleet. In Sappho, the “army of ships” is one of three different kinds of army, neatly collocated with cavalry and infantry. If I say “fleet,” I tend to think of something military, with that punny flavor of swiftness special to English. If I say “all the ships,” I see sails in different shapes, ships with high-polished wood and boats with flaking paint; I review in my mind all the names for floating vessels in Greek and English, and I savor their sounds and images. These lip-smacks of words, their savors, the snatches of poetry they evoke—they feed my heart as well as my brain.

  As I work, embodied, in time, I am never conscious of the dictionary as a whole, as a book, as an entity out in the world. I work on it in fragments, I translate cutouts and pieces. I might translate hundreds of words in a day and barely cover a half-dozen pages of the tome. No one will read this dictionary. People will consult it, looking up separate entries in separate places, based on the logic of the sentence they are trying to puzzle out. That logic is every bit as logical (or illogical) as the alphabetic sequence that is the filing system of all these words. The arc of alpha through omega vanishes in the use of the thing. The initial letter of the word that enrolls in its proper place on the grand arc is arbitrary, and so is its meaning, without good explication. People will read what they can find about a word fragmented from the other words that give it life, or brought to life in a fragment of poetry out of its own context. Who was demanding a ransom, and did they receive it? Why is a clepsydra, the ancient hourglass, etymologically a “thief of water”?

  In a good afternoon I do the equivalent of four print-dictionary pages and come out as exhausted as the priestess of Delphi after her prophetic trance. I worked on alpha for months. I should point out, though, that before getting into alpha I had already translated pi (which is almost as long), and theta, zeta, and iota, and after I finished alpha I mopped up mu. My translating these letters out of alphabetical order didn’t matter a whit—an eloquent demonstration of the arbitrariness of the arc to which I’m anchored.

  Some words change meaning significantly over time; some words mean different things in different places. (In British English, an eraser is called a “rubber,” and British visitors to the U.S. learn to their embarrassment that’s not what the word means here. Or, if you’re an American-English-speaker, try saying “fanny pack” over in the U.K., and expect embarrassed sniggers or derisive snorts of laughter.) Many Greek words have multiple meanings, so that across the contexts of space, time, and speakers a word can have a spectrum of senses that includes opposites. I always pause with these opposites—they seem to want to teach me something: that blessings and curses share the same bed, can come from the same mouth with the same word; that the boundaries of learn and teach are fuzzy, as are those of borrow and lend.

  An array of different font styles and background colors differentiates the aforementioned stage directions, just as you’d expect in a reference dictionary. On the computer, these different colors and formats are built on xml code, a fact I can repeat but, not being a tech-head, can tell very little more about. On the other hand, I can now fix code using xml tags. In the little editing panel that is my theater of activities, it’s easy to ride roughshod over underlying code and squish it. Hitting UNDO usually leaves you worse off than before you made the mistake. Furthermore, English and Italian do not order words in the same way, and sometimes a piece of the Italian I’m overwriting is superfluous, or (more often) I need to add something to the English version. I want to make the most elegant possible English translation of the Greek word with no vestige of Italian idiom; if I don’t want to contort my English, I must manipulate code.

  When I was a graduate student at Stanford, sophomores referred to my ilk as “fuzzies”—I’m a computer user in the same way that I’m a car user. I can lift up the hood but know little more than how to check and replace fluids. But now that I’ve learned to “view source code” and tidy it up, and now that I’m free to order the components as seems best, I find myself spending even longer on each entry, making sure that every comma and abbreviation is tagged correctly. The job has been an arc of learning for me, and someone who went before me doubtless went through a similar arc preparing the database I work on, building the Ancient Greek–Italian entries for me to convert. When I flag mistakes, I think of all the inconsistencies in my own translating: how I overlooked errors of code I had not yet known how to see when I started out, or my potentially ambiguous translations of Greek’s many predicative adjectives. Then I multiply this by the cohort of translators living in different countries and continents, all doubtless making different decisions on these matters. This dictionary will not have pure, seamless skin with perfect surface tension. Even after we proofread it keenly and closely, suturing some of the idiosyncratic choices of different translators, seams and inconsistencies will split and spill.

  I worked on words beginning anti- for over a week—hundreds of them—finally running out and into words beginning antl-. Just about any verb, and many nouns too, can have an anti- version. I’ve seen permutations of meaning and nuance produced by this prefix ranging from mutual to reciprocal to turn-taking to corresponding to facing to opposite to against, so that the word from which our antiphonal comes can be used to mean either “harmonious” or “discordant.” As a user of English, I am sometimes fussy about redundancy. “Also . . . as well” is a pet peeve. Why say “return back” when back is an intrinsic part of the meaning of return? But as I go through various words prefixed anti- in ways that at first seem redundant, I realize how nuanced a single word can be. “To resound back” sounds redundant, but prefixed with anti-, the Greek verb to resound can mean simply “to resound back,” or “to resound in response to something,” or “to sing in responsion”—two choirs singing in call and response—I have to admit this is not redundancy. And how beautiful the Italian for “resound”—rimbombare. Echo and Narcissus again, a mirror maze of antiphony across millennia and miles, where I keep finding reflected my own thoughts and images.

  When I pick myself up and dust myself off from the anti- ride, the antl- words are waiting. This seems an unlikely and cumbersome mouthful of sounds—but of course, that’s an English-speaker’s perspective. We have only antler and its derivatives, and antlia, a pure Greek word you’ve likely never seen used. But even in this comprehensive dictionary, Greek has only eleven entries so beginning, as opposed to seventeen whole pages of the preceding anti- sequence, and we move on to the richer tribe of antr-.

  Ancient Greek—and Italian too—use different forms of one and the same verb to indicate, for example, that a person is dressing someone else or is dressing him- or herself, or that a general is gathering his army versus the army is gathering; English grammar says dress or gather and lets the context and pronouns show this difference. Translating terms for weights and measures, let alone concepts from the theoretical physics of the era, is educated guesswork, and it exemplifies the bizarreness of the enterprise of finding words in twenty-first-century English—or Italian—to fit with words from a world, a people, a set of concepts and cultural practices, of 2,000 years ago. Their rules and attire for boxing and wrestling were
different from ours. Their religious practices, superstitions, and metaphors were very different—although, like us, these people shook off sleep and used grains of sand on a beach to evoke a countless multitude. Other metaphorical extensions are at a remove from us. We can understand what it means to have a lobe missing in an organ of the body, but we don’t have an adjective lobeless. And if we did have that adjective, it would probably mean nothing more than “lacking a lobe,” whereas in Greek it means “inauspicious.” Unlike the Greeks, we don’t use the condition of sacrificed animals’ organs to predict the outcome of an intended project, so for us a missing lobe in an ox’s liver doesn’t spell defeat in an intended battle. And then there are metaphors that may be beyond us. We can understand the phrase “to wipe one’s head with a sword” in its literal meaning, just as we can understand the concept of “lobeless.” But why is this phrase used to mean “to exonerate oneself, declare oneself innocent (of a sacrilegious crime)”? The Greeks saw the grains of sand innumerable as do we, but words and phrases such as these remind me of how differently (and of what else) they also saw.

  In the crossing from Ancient Greek to a modern language, not everything transmits. Given my obsession with arcs of crossing and their beginnings and endings, it’s no surprise that this is only one of several arcs that preoccupy me as I work. The dictionary itself, in its finished book form, appears as a grand trajectory—exemplifies the concept of “trajectory.” Alpha through omega and A through Z are bywords for inclusive comprehensiveness, with each letter containing its own alphabet of words. But no one reads a dictionary that way: if a person has more than one word to consult, these words are likely in quite different places in the dictionary, the ordering of the words being altogether arbitrary relative to their meanings. There may be sequences of words related to one another by a common prefix, just as in life there may be a stretch of days that seem alike, but then the list continues to something completely different, and the order of the letters does nothing to warn us of the change.

  Embodied, moving through time, I translate in fragments: a one-, two-, or three-word translation (hair, down, foliage); an indication of whether hair refers to what grows on a person’s head or what grows on the branches of trees; a short quotation from ancient comedy punning on the two meanings. There are slots into which each of these explications needs to be typed—physical as well as mental movement. Although the meat and sinew and aqueous humors of my body have no knowledge of the layouts of computer keyboards, my eyes and fingers know where the letters are and produce words and punctuated sentences because the keyboard is there, making patterns that would be mere meaningless tattoos were there nothing resting on my lap. My mind controls my body, but I do not know how.

  The fingers on my right hand constantly press the arrow keys to move between these slots or slide the mouse to jump from one to the next; my left pinkie constantly tucks under to reach the SHIFT key, to coordinate with my right pinkie on the right-arrow key to highlight a whole word or passage that needs overwriting. The elephantine dictionary project is an abstract conception, but I am a body in a chair, moving my fingers, tapping keys, and making things appear and disappear on the screen in front of me. I am moving my hands in repetitive ways at awkward angles, doing physical work in real time. Yet the cobblestone arch of arbitrary and unimportant and disused words is often more real to me than bodily sensations, or even than interactions with other human beings.

  This work with words, this anchoring sequence of arbitrariness, this paradox of orderings and numberings and xml codings and nerve impulses and bodily sensations—this is where I feel my heart most alive. By way of this practice, this immersion in words and the sculpting of reflections or responsions between and among the other languages and English, my feelings are astir when I’m choosing whether to say “word list,” “lexicon,” “catalogue,” or “litany.” Then, a richening, a rightness, comes when I hit on “corpus,” for the compendium of words is a corpus—a body—mirroring and shaping my own. Words are the most perfect index and teacher of what it is to be a human being.

  Everyone who speaks is choosing words, juxtaposing words, invoking words and their special flavors and resonances—not always the same ones for the same speakers—regardless of how aware each speaker may be of making choices. A body settles into its most comfortable postures, just as a corpus of language features commoner words, more readily available to choose, at different times and places. The isthmus is a neck of land and the neck of a body. Words map my animal body onto the world I inhabit. Words confirm that I am a microcosm of what surrounds me; they are the air through which I see myself reflected in my landscape, the ether through which whatever I send out into the world will echo back to me.

  SEBASTIAN JUNGER

  The Bonds of Battle

  FROM Vanity Fair

  The first time I experienced what I now understand to be post-traumatic stress disorder, I was in a subway station in New York City, where I live. It was almost a year before the attacks of 9/11, and I’d just come back from two months in Afghanistan with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance. I was on assignment to write a profile of Massoud, who fought a desperate resistance against the Taliban until they assassinated him two days before 9/11. At one point during my trip we were on a frontline position that his forces had just taken over from the Taliban, and the inevitable counterattack started with an hour-long rocket barrage. All we could do was curl up in the trenches and hope. I felt deranged for days afterward, as if I’d lived through the end of the world.

  By the time I got home, though, I wasn’t thinking about that or any of the other horrific things we’d seen; I mentally buried all of it until one day, a few months later, when I went into the subway at rush hour to catch the C train downtown. Suddenly I found myself backed up against a metal support column, absolutely convinced I was going to die. There were too many people on the platform, the trains were coming into the station too fast, the lights were too bright, the world was too loud. I couldn’t quite explain what was wrong, but I was far more scared than I’d ever been in Afghanistan.

  I stood there with my back to the column until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I sprinted for the exit and walked home. I had no idea that what I’d just experienced had anything to do with combat; I just thought I was going crazy. For the next several months I kept having panic attacks whenever I was in a small place with too many people—airplanes, ski gondolas, crowded bars. Gradually the incidents stopped, and I didn’t think about them again until I found myself talking to a woman at a picnic who worked as a psychotherapist. She asked whether I’d been affected by my war experiences, and I said no, I didn’t think so. But for some reason I described my puzzling panic attack in the subway. “That’s called post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said. “You’ll be hearing a lot more about that in the next few years.”

  I had classic short-term (acute) PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks that remind you of the danger, and you want to be, by turns, anxious and depressed. Anxiety keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself at greater risk. This is a universal human adaptation to danger that is common to other mammals as well. It may be unpleasant, but it’s preferable to getting eaten. (Because PTSD is so adaptive, many have begun leaving the word disorder out of the term to avoid stigmatizing a basically healthy reaction.)

  Because PTSD is a natural response to danger, it’s almost unavoidable in the short term and mostly self-correcting in the long term. Only about 20 percent of people exposed to trauma react with long-term (chronic) PTSD. Rape is one of the most psychologically devastating things that can happen to a person, for example—far more traumatizing than most military deployments—and according to a 1992 study published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress,
94 percent of rape survivors exhibit signs of extreme trauma immediately afterward. And yet nine months later 47 percent of rape survivors have recovered enough to resume living normal lives.

  Combat is generally less traumatic than rape but harder to recover from. The reason, strangely, is that the trauma of combat is interwoven with other, positive experiences that become difficult to separate from the harm. “Treating combat veterans is different from treating rape victims, because rape victims don’t have this idea that some aspects of their experience are worth retaining,” says Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and director of traumatic-stress studies at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Yehuda has studied PTSD in a wide range of people, including combat veterans and Holocaust survivors. “For most people in combat, their experiences range from the best to the worst of times,” Yehuda adds. “It’s the most important thing someone has ever done—especially since these people are so young when they go in—and it’s probably the first time they’re ever free, completely, of their societal constraints. They’re going to miss being entrenched in this very important and defining world.”

  Oddly, one of the most traumatic events for soldiers is witnessing harm to other people—even to the enemy. In a survey done after the first Gulf War by David Marlowe, an expert in stress-related disorders working with the Department of Defense, combat veterans reported that killing an enemy soldier—or even witnessing one getting killed—was more distressing than being wounded oneself. But the very worst experience, by a significant margin, was having a friend die. In war after war, army after army, losing a buddy is considered to be the most distressing thing that can possibly happen. It serves as a trigger for psychological breakdown on the battlefield and readjustment difficulties after the soldier has returned home.