There is research on language change that looks at how many of the core words of a language, the two or three hundred most basic words, will typically change over a thousand years just given linguistic drift. The techniques involved were developed to try to answer the question of when various language families split off from Indo-European. I recently read The Horse, the Wheel and Language : how bronze-age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world by David Anthony and have been thinking about how one tries to look back into the distant past. That was what made me imagine that someday, in the very remote future, scholars might use software to shift through all the blogs being written now looking for clues to what the past was back when it was living still as the present experienced by all the billion lives of those now gone and utterly forgotten.

Thanks to computer technology and the endless archiving of absolutely everything, in a thousand years more information will be available about any given “nameless asshole” , as Burroughs would say, alive today  than is available now about anyone who lived a thousand years ago or about most “important” people, presidents, movie stars or whatever, who died before 1940. I’ve taught “Research Methods” often enough to easily imagine scholars in the future digging into the virtual rubbish heap we leave behind with all the gusto they show today for digging through family bibles and the records of long defunct business enterprises.  

My forty year struggle to learn the French language continues along with my struggle to achieve competence in mathematics and music. That is a strange three item bucket list but it is honest. I am happiest on the days when I do a little math, a little French and play my guitar for a while without asking myself why any of it matters at this late date. Dying peacefully in my sleep any given night would be close enough to a happy ending for me at this point; I’ve felt that way since I was sixteen.

I’ve forgotten this sense of life as a simple given without any point or purpose beyond whatever silliness one pursues to pass the time for long periods in my life but, finally, the pain of disillusionment has always been greater than the illusion of a meaning that does not go away just because I stop believing in it. My failures (French, math, music) are still with me in a way that my successes are not. I know a lot about writing and literature and even write well myself when I take the trouble. I understood a lot of philosophy and social science once. I still remember some of it and could re-learn the rest if I needed to. I have all the tools needed to be a fine qualitative researcher. Some of them are rusty but they are all still there waiting to be polished up and put to use.

Qualitative Research is about words and I’m good with words. I think I tried to fall in love with numbers when I began to see words as being like water and myself as someone who had swum out way too far. No matter how well you swim, you drawn if you go out too far. Numbers felt like solid ground that I could neither talk into existence nor talk away no matter how good I was at blowing exquisitely crafted puffs of air. Numbers felt hard and real and I tried to love them but I could never love anything as solid as earth. I love puffs of air and swimming out where it is possible to dive as deep as anyone can without ever touching bottom. Do Dolphins drawn when they die or do they wash ashore when they are all but gone, creatures of water and air who leave the water just before their last puff of air leaves them.

I want another language. I want to start over with words in another life and another world made of French and not English; the whole creation is made of words with nothing underneath but dirt. I could be born again if I could forget all the things I know how to say in English and discover a world made of French one word at a time. I’d like to wake up tomorrow morning not knowing a world of English and somehow knowing that I could never re-learn, any more than Mencken could learn to read and write again after his stroke. This should seem horrible to anyone hearing the story but if I had one wish, one trick for the night to play on me just to prove that there is something back there behind the curtain after all, this would be it. This would be even better than dying because I get to be born again into a world where everyone with any compassion knows that learning the words to speak myself is the only thing I need to do before I die.