Yet Untitled 113 - Late Fluency
Thoughts on love and late blooming
Greetings Yet Untitler,
Yesterday, I was reading a short story by Graham Greene - The Destructors. While reading, I was struck by something: I was reading with ease. I remembered a feeling when, back in school, I used to struggle with English of a certain level, wondering whether I was truly comprehending the words I was reading. I usually managed a decent level of comprehension, but I remember the struggle. Even when I studied more complex texts at St. Stephen’s college for my BA in English Literature, I remember struggling there as well.
Now, in my 44th year, finally, this sense of struggle with English is gone, despite it having been my first language all my life. It’s surprising. It’s secret. Some of you may find it extra-surprising, reminding me of the days when I co-edited my school’s weekly newspaper. If you do, I confess - even then, I kept to simple prose in my writing and kept my struggle with more complex language private.
I’m always in awe of those with early fluency. What a head-start they have, my friends who seem to have been born already knowing visual grammar; already knowing how to work magic with numbers. I struggled with numbers and that struggle continues. But I remember some classmates who were fluent with numbers and were always ten exercises ahead of me in math class. My considerable lag became the stuff of nightmares, still plaguing my sleep every now and then.
I took a long time to gain fluency in some of the skills underlying my profession. Even the one skill I seemed to have a talent for - screenwriting - initially would show some spark; then sputter and smoke to a stop. Sometimes I wished - can’t we just keep going? This frustration - in wanting to say something, anything, but not having the words (perhaps even a subject) - is a feeling I’ve been very familiar with over the years. I can equate it to wanting to be in love, but not finding recourse. Back in the day, I wrote a lot of bad poetry on the matter 😂.
All through my 20s - around me, my peers would thrive, already entrenched in their love affairs with language, cinema craft and also, with other human beings. I often asked why I had got the short end of the stick in this respect.
Eventually - love came, as did fluency.
This is interesting. I didn’t expect to write about love when writing about fluency, but it happened.
I’m wondering why.
The Destructors is a complex story with a complex message. In it, a gang of teenagers destroy a 200 year old house belonging to a man who bore them no enmity, in fact - was even nice to them. When I say destroy, I mean destroy - the house isn’t standing by the end of the story.
As I read The Destructors, I imagined my younger self scratching his head at this puzzling story. The kids are fifteen years old. The house was spared by the blitz in the war. Graham Greene leaves you with a lot of unanswered questions. I also imagined my college-going self looking wide-eyed at my professors who’d show me what they saw in between the lines of Greene’s prose. And now I see myself, having arrived at a place where, pretty much at the first glance - the language, the author behind it, his craft and its mechanics - they’re all visible to me in ways I could have never believed possible earlier.
I say this with humility.
It’s just a place I’ve arrived at after a journey that I’m very grateful for. What I’m saying in this instalment is that it feels like it’s taken longer for me to have travelled this distance than it may have for others.
Does it matter? How should I feel about it? Once in a while, others have suggested that this late blooming may be something of my own making; that I could (and should have) got here faster. But I have an opinion on that, which I shared with some detail in this previous instalment:
I’ll suffice to say for now being here is what matters most, especially for the elevated view of the road that lies ahead. The road ahead is a banal metaphor of immanent possibility.
Why I wrote about Love in this instalment
Now I know.
Perhaps the experience of fluency is similar to feelings experienced when being in love - feelings that orbit possibility and the hope of creation. For Vani and me, love resulted in the creation of these two fascinating new lives:
Thanks for listening. With you out there, listening consistently, you - dearest YUer - have played a part in helping me acquire fluency.
This fluency really feels like it’s come when it needed to come.
Thanks again. And do drop me a line in case this instalment triggered any thinkin’ in yer noggin.
Lots of love,
V
PS. I first encountered The Destructors in Donnie Darko - one of my favourite coming of age films.
In this scene below, etched in my mind, Drew Barrymore plays one of those teachers who threw open the world between the lines of text for me.
Some of my professors are also readers of YU. If you are reading this one - please know: I cannot tell you how grateful I am!