The Last Samurai is a book people will still be reading in 200 years

But, more importantly, they should read it today!

Claudia was extremely good at Sanskrit. She was a graduate student who was studying the language at a top-ranked PhD program, but even by those standards she was exceptional. You see, most of the people in this program claimed to be able to read the language. Certainly, when they were given a text, they could produce a translation. Often the translation seemed, to Claudia, to be more or less accurate. There were differences in terms of word-choice, meaning, interpretation, but the translations were generally good.

However, the way these other graduate students spoke about the language was absolutely bizarre. For instance, if Claudia asked them about a text, they'd say, "Oh, I haven't translated that yet." Or they'd say, "I just did a translation of that." For a while, she'd thought this was just a verbal tic—perhaps their way of saying “I read this text” was to say “I translated it”—but the other strange thing was that most of these people who claimed to understand Sanskrit seemed to have read relatively little of it. They'd usually read a few sections of the Mahabharata, Ramayana, the Vedas. But...Claudia was about thirty years old, and she'd read the entire Mahabharata, Ramayana, all the Puranas, and all of the Vedas. This was a lot, but it was only about twenty million words of text—the equivalent of two hundred contemporary novels.

Most of her fellow students hadn't done that. When she asked them about it, they said, "Oh, there aren't good translations."

At a certain point, this got to be so strange, that one day while she was out with her cohort at the bar, she said, "But...what's the point of learning the language if we're still relying on translations?"

"Well, yes," said one of her friends. "I can read the Vedas, but it’s impossible to know if I’m reading them correctly."

"Isn’t that the whole point of learning the language? So that eventually you just know whether or not you’re correct?"

"Of course, of course," he said. "But still...if I come across something I don't understand, then I want to look it up, cross-reference it, ask questions about it, and it's pretty hard to do that once you get deep into these texts, where there’s not a lot of English-language resources.”

"But...aren't we supposed to be the experts? Why do we need to consult other people at all?”

"I don't know if we're experts. Maybe if we study for a lifetime, we can be experts."

"But how can you study unless you read? I don't want to be rude, but what exactly are you doing with your time?"

"Look, Claudia. I don't need this attitude. Nobody else will say it, but…we don’t believe you’re actually reading these books. Sure you can tell people you're reading them, but who knows what that means? You're passing your eyes over them, but do you really understand them? In India, they say nobody can understand these books unless they've studied them with a guru—it's a living tradition. You can't just read them."

"I’m sorry, are you studying with a guru? I don't understand this critique! There are plenty of commentaries you can read as well—all written by gurus—thousands of years of commentaries."

"That's not how people do it, Claudia. Nobody just sits down and reads Sanskrit as easily as you read English."

"I can do it—if you can’t, then maybe that’s something you should correct!”

"Sure, you can do it. That's great—so what?"

"So...now I can write and publish about these texts. And have opinions about them. Now I can participate in academic life."

"And…are you doing that? What have you published?"

And the truth was, Claudia's academic output wasn't that great. She'd never totally understood the point of all this scholarly activity: the papers, the abstracts, the conferences—any of it. She loved ancient languages. She loved reading these texts. But...anyone who wanted to learn about them should read the books themselves. What was the point, she wondered, of publishing opinions about them in English for the benefit of an audience of academics who largely (it seemed) were incapable of reading the books themselves! The whole system seemed utterly bankrupt to her.

There were lots of Sanskrit classics for which good translations didn't exist. Ideally she would just sit down, day after day, and produce those translations. That would be a great use of her time. But...who would pay her to do them? She tried to interest various academic publishers in her skills. To prove that she had the ability to do justice to these texts, Claudia solicited testimonials from various academics, and these testimonials were appropriately glowing. But, unfortunately, they weren’t quite glowing enough! For publishers to really understand the depth of her skills, they’d need to understand how bad everybody else was at this, and none of her references were willing to make this comparison in the stark, realistic terms that she’d need them to use if she was going to actually get hired.

The problem was, in this academic economy there existed so much ersatz knowledge that it was impossible to market yourself as someone with genuine knowledge! And that problem existed because this entire system was built on obfuscating the fact that most of these people don't really understand the language they claim to be an expert in.

Which was fine for them, she supposed. She didn't begrudge anyone their living. But it made things very difficult for her, when all the translation jobs went to people who were accounted "experts" on the basis of their English-language publications and fancy degrees and fellowships, but who actually weren't skilled enough translators to produce readable translations in the amount of time required. Like, some of these books were taking years and years to translate, and she was fairly certain she could've done them in maybe six months.

---

This was definitely a conundrum! Luckily, she had a solution. Because, you see, all of this Sanskrit knowledge had in fact given her magical powers.

What's funny is that reading and understanding these texts had long been reputed to give you magic powers. This was strikingly different from mastery of Persian, Arabic, Latin, or Greek texts—nobody thought being able to read Plotinus would give you magic powers. With the Vedas, it was quite different. One of the core tenets of the Hindu faiths was that reading these texts was supposed to give you magic powers, and in actual fact it did give you those powers!

So she had these magic powers, which were really the standard ones. She could alter her form. She could create illusions. She could summon all manner of weapons—some of which were capable of destroying the Earth. She wasn't immortal, but she did periodically have Gods come to her, asking if she wanted any boons. Still, she had the wisdom to know that all earthly rewards were transitory—like the sage Mudgala she understood that even if she ascended to heaven, she would someday fall from its height. True wisdom consisted of accepting her current life.

She also understood the deeper logic, which is that if Western academia ever actually embraced Sanskrit learning, then belief in Christianity would dissolve like cotton candy dipped into water. Because...reading the Bible (even in the original) didn't give you magic powers, while reading the Vedas did. And that's a truth that would be very difficult for the West to handle. Claudia understand that, on a cosmic level, Christianity served a purpose, but still, compared to the Vedas, Christianity was a very obscure and twisting path to knowledge of the divine. Good for plebs, basically—but if you want real knowledge, you should learn Sanskrit.

After leaving her graduate program, she wrote a novel that described the relative simplicity of the Sanskrit language, and which explained the sorts of magical powers that could accrue to the person who engaged in a ten-year-long study of the language. Publishing the book was a rather painful experience, because it was clear her editor didn't really understand it—the woman kept wanting to simplify the message by taking out a lot of the Sanskrit—this woman seemed to think the theme would be more universal if it the knowledge involved was less specific. Maybe knowledge and study in the abstract were all you really needed to be happy?

But no, the core of the message was really the Sanskrit. Through the characters in the novel, Claudia wanted to explain the basics of how to learn Sanskrit and, moreover, to impress upon people that learning Sanskrit was an extremely easy and profitable way of gaining magical powers.

Her editor kept trying to aestheticize this message—kept talking to her about themes and plot and symbols and character development. Claudia was willing to work with the editor up to a point, but ultimately she realized the editor just didn't understand that, to Claudia, the stuff about how learning Sanskrit gives you magic powers—this was the core of the book. To the editor, it was a story about a mother and a child, and their will to survive. To Claudia it was those things too, but it was also about magic powers!

Anyway, lots of people read the book. It wasn't a runaway bestseller, but it did well. Very, very, very few people who read the book actually went out and learned Sanskrit to the sufficient level—But one or two did, and they sent her some emails being like, "Wow, so you were telling the truth about the magic powers!"

"Yep," she wrote back. "Yes, I was. I do not know how I could’ve possibly been more clear!”

Anyway, she's still alive, still writing, still reading, still learning. She's quite poor, lives in a very small apartment, scrimps on heat and food. But she spends most of her time at the library anyway, looking for new things to read and learn.

This story has a happy ending, I suppose.

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Afterword

This tale was inspired by Bibek Debroy, but also by Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, which I finished reading last week.

No description of this book could possibly do justice to the loopy, engrossing experience of reading the book. However, on a surface level, The Last Samurai is about an American woman in London. She is a grad student, but she gets tired of being a grad student, so she runs off and gets a job at a publisher. Then she has a child. And she ends up teaching this child all kinds of foreign languages (he is reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in the original at age four). Eventually, almost seamlessly, he takes over narration of the book, and the latter half is his quest to find his father.

The book is incredible. It is flawless. It is an absolute masterpiece. It reminds me of Anna Karenina in its utter perfection. I have not felt this way about a contemporary book since I read Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, but I believe this book is superior to The Corrections. You know that sense you get when you read Anna Karenina that everything in this book is exactly what it needs to be? That it all flows from one ethical principle, one coherent worldview, and even if it seems kind of random (like all the stuff in Anna Karenina about farming), it is still absolutely necessary to the book as a whole? You know that feeling?

Well, that is what you get from The Last Samurai. It is insane that this book was written in my lifetime. It is so different from every other contemporary book I have read. There is nothing like it! Reading this book was kind of like seeing the De Lempicka paintings: I immediately felt like I was in very good hands with DeWitt. I had complete trust in her vision.

The book at times seems unstructured, but it's not—the ending really pays off, it is so beautiful and meaningful. This book made me reevaluate every other book I've read. It made me think—maybe I should hold some of these books to a higher standard! For instance, I enjoyed reading Infinite Jest on a page-by-page level, and I highly recommended it to other people, but in retrospect Infinite Jest didn’t actually cohere. It did not go anywhere—it was less than the sum of its parts.

With DeWitt, the book is so enjoyable on a page- and line-level that, almost unconsciously, you expect it not to cohere, because it’s the kind of book that actually doesn't need a plot at all! Even if it went nowhere, people would still read it!

But this book does. I mean, I could describe it more for you, but the more I described it, the more the book would sound similar to other books—it'd sound akin to something you've read before. But it's not. There's nothing else like it. And what's astonishing is that the book is so engaging, so easy to read. It is substantially easier to read than, say, Garth Greenwell or any other contemporary literary writer you could name. This is a book that you can read as if it was an airport thriller. You just fall right into it. It was an absolute pleasure to be so engaged.

Here is a quotation to give you a sense of it. This is a dialogue between the boy, Ludo, and his mom Sibylla, where he talks to her about how much he wants to attend Oxford.

I said: But if I got in at 11 people would say all my life that I got in at 11!

Sib said: They certainly would. She said: Or I could give you a piece of paper certifying that you read Sugata Sanshiro in the original Japanese at the age of 6 and all your life people would say you read Sugata Sanshiro in Japanese at the age of 6...

Sib seemed to have no interest at all in helping me set a record. I argued with her for a long time until at last she said: Why are you saying all this to me? Do whatever you want. If you pay £35 you can go to as many lectures as you want; the RATIONAL thing to do would be to pay £35 or whatever it is, get the lecture lists, go to whatever looks interesting, collect reading lists, go through the reading lists, decide on the basis of evidence which lecturers are moderately competent teachers, decide on the basis of evidence which fields you are interested in & who is doing interesting work in those fields; collect further evidence at OTHER universities (assuming THEY let in paying guests) by going to lectures given by the interesting people to see whether they are reasonably competent teachers & then decide where to go when you are about 16.

This is the kind of book that people learn a foreign language in order to read! But luckily it’s (mostly) in English—you should definitely read it.¹

P.S. I have no desire to share any election thoughts. I'll explain my reasoning further in a paid post, but the short version is that I don't really want to discuss electoral politics in this newsletter. I know most of you don't expect me to, and many of you are probably relieved by this note. Originally I was going to omit even this post script, but I figured somebody might think it was weird to not mention the election at all, even in passing.²

1. Thanks to

Celine Nguyen

for encouraging me to read this book! She also wrote about it here.

2. People often try to pin down where I stand politically—the answer is quite boring, because it is exactly the answer you'd expect for a San Francisco-based professional with my demographic and educational profile.