Love, Language, and Work

I woke up this morning with an unusual sense of clarity about my sadness and already that clarity is slipping away, so I'm going to try to fix it here. I woke up this morning and I felt instantly disconnected, from any people or from any purpose. Happiness lies in love and in work: love satisfies an intimate but irrational need to be reassured that you are not alone and that you are understood, and work satisfies a rational need to be directed towards something and to be improving in traceable stages - to be appreciated for those improvements. Love is to be appreciated unconditionally and irrationally, to be able to satisfy and maintain the whims of some human being; work is to be appreciated rationally, to satisfy the principled understanding of some human beings. To be loved is to be told your personality has worth; to be appreciated in work is to be told your intellectual efforts have worth. It's easy to mistake being loved with somebody appreciating your intellectual efforts (intellectual efforts to become a better person), but it really is more irrational than that; it's simply about being open and matching someone's personal ideal of who they can love, which is pre-set and has little to do with you. All you can do is offer yourself, which requires being okay with not fitting every pre-set notion of loveable.

Anyway, I feel sad here both because I feel unable to offer myself to the best of my ability (language limits me) and because I am unable to work intensely and have my efforts recognised. Perhaps I'm not trying my hardest in either camp, but it feels unfair to be so restricted simply because of language. I hope to remain vigilant when I'm back in the UK, back in lands of language I'm comfortable with, that language is our principle power - more so than charisma, beauty, or intellect; the ability of expression allows you to offer yourself and to absorb others complexly. Language is the great tool, of love and of work. Both of those things reduce to wanting to be appreciated in one way or another, and you can only be appreciated by expressing yourself and understanding the expression of others.

Here I am limited in both those respects, which means my happiness is fundamentally limited too. I don't know what this means for language-learning in my future. I enjoy the task of language-learning, the grammar of it, the slow increase in comprehension. But to be thrown out into a foreign world without an anchor in love or in work has proven depressing. This is why I've enjoyed class-based language-learning with no trouble so far; I've always had recourse to escape into my own language, to be able to express myself with others or to work on something else after class's hours. Perhaps I'm not made to reach practical fluency; perhaps language-learning should remain a hobby for me rather than something that infiltrates every corner of my life. And that's fine by me. I've been fooled that the ultimate aim for all language learning should be practical fluency, conversational prowess. But as long as you have it in your own language, it's fine that language remains a mere hobby with respect to other ones. It's fine to enjoy just the act of building up a new vocabulary and having something once foreign to you now be more intelligible. But this doesn't mean you have to go out and live with that language or subsume that culture. The myth of the importance of orality need not live on. If only I could have worked this out sooner.