The process of learning a foreign language seemed to him the paradigm of human endeavor.
One struggled in the darkness; and mastery came—when it came—in increments so small as to be recognizable only in retrospect.
And accomplishment carried no particular joy, only a feeling of irritability. As, he thought, of course the word for “eternally” in Hebrew was tamid.
“Further,” he thought, “to whom could I boast of my mastery of Hebrew? The Jews would take the ability as a matter of course, and no one else would care.”
In learning, one said, “I will know it in the future.” But that particular future never arrived, for the term—in its use here—meant “the present.”
“Not a time to come,” he thought, “but a magical, simultaneous present. Like this time in all respects save that in it I will speak the foreign tongue.
“For who would pine for a time to come which was remarkable only for the fact that time had passed, in which passing time one had suffered to master a skill?
“No,” he thought, “the future is simple idolatry. And, similarly, ‘Change,’ and ‘tomorrow.’
“Equally the past. For that is how they’ve condemned me—in the search for a magical past, like the present in all respects but with no Jews.
“They long for some magical past when there was no strife; and point and say, ‘If he were gone, this past would reappear.’
“So this past is, again, the future—for even if one could return to it, when would one do so but in a subsequent moment? So, it is the Magic Future, free of strife, in which the Goyim will be freed from their historic impediment, and in which, equally, I will have mastered Hebrew, and the seven forms of the Hebrew verb.
“Well, then,” he thought, “how can that future exist in which, at once, I have mastered Hebrew and there are no more Jews?
“Clearly no one future can exist, for all are, to a certain extent, at least potentially contradictory; or, say, ‘mutually excluding’; and so, it is not the future at all which one seeks, but (in a supportive proof) idolatry, and, so, it is proved.
“Which does not help me with the following verb: shin hay mem, to guard. Shamoor, guarded. Shomer, guarding. Nismor, guarding, or protecting, oneself.
“How peaceful it is here,” he thought.