Writes Dorfman of that time: “Instead, I instinctively chose, the first time I was truly alone with myself and took control of the one thing that was entirely my own in the world, my language, I instinctively chose to refuse the multiple, complex, in-between person I would someday become, this man who is shared by two equal languages and who has come to believe that to tolerate differences and indeed embody them personally and collectively might be our only salvation as a species.”

What Dorfman was echoing in those words, even if he didn’t explicitly acknowledge the reference, was the conviction of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger that “we do not speak language, language speaks us”. Of course Heidegger, while he may have made the notion famous, did not come to it out of nowhere either – the idea that the language we inhabit influences our experience of the world, that different languages colour our minds in subtly yet palpably different ways, has been a preoccupation of poets and thinkers since time immemorial.

¶ 9:15 AM