The Semitic languages require different verbal forms for the masculine and the feminine (“you eat” would have different forms depending on whether you are female or male), whereas English does not make gender distinctions on verbs.
George Steiner concludes from this that “an entire anthropology of sexual equality is implicit in the fact that our verbs, in distinction from those of Semitic tongues, do not indicate the gender of the agent.”
Really? There are some languages that are so sexually enlightened that they make no gender distinctions even on pronouns, so that even “he” and “she” are fused into one unisex plastic synthetic creation. Which languages might these be? Turkish, Indonesian, and Uzbek, to name a few examples—not exactly languages of societies renowned for their anthropology of sexual equality.
They are “the person of our dreams”. Yes, they are the person we are looking for, but not because they are coming into our experience to make us happy. They are the person we are looking for because we have a sacred agreement with them to reflect exactly what requires integrating in order for us to regain present moment awareness.
Sayfa 250Kitabı okudu
Yeong-hye was four years younger than her, enough of an age gap for them not to have been in competition with each other growing up. As small children their young cheeks were frequently left throbbing by their heavy-handed father, and Yeong-hye had provoked in In-hye a sense of responsibility that resembled maternal affection, a need to expend all her energy in looking out for this younger sister. She had watched, marveling, as this same sister, once up to her elbows in the dirt
and suffering from a recurring heat rash on the backs of her knees, grew up and got married. The one thing that caused her distress was that, as she got older, Yeong-hye became more and more taciturn. She’d always had this side to her, of course, but she had also been perfectly cheerful and sociable when the occasion called for it. Somehow—not suddenly, but over a period of time—she became
difficult to read. So difficult that there were times when she seemed like a total stranger.
A day or two after Ji-woo was born, when Yeong-hye came to the hospital to say hello to her first nephew, rather than congratulating her sister she had simply muttered to herself, “I’ve never seen such
a tiny child…so this is what they’re like when they’ve just been born?”
There’d been something faintly unsettling about the quiet smile playing around Yeong-hye’s mouth. What seemed to be happening was that Yeong-hye was retreating from herself, becoming as distant to herself as she was to her sister. A forlorn face, behind a mask of composure. This was clearly nothing like the melancholy that sometimes afflicted her husband, and yet in certain respects they were both baffling to her in exactly the same way. They were both descending further into silence.
What a terrible feeling to love someone and not be able to help them.
Actually, I know exactly how that feels.
What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore striped pyjamas and which people wore uniforms?
Sayfa 100 - Bruno
Eve’s Diary
For I feel like an experiment, I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel convinced that that is what I AM—an experiment; just an experiment, and nothing more.
