In the grand scheme of my life, there are only a few things I feel like I’ve truly wasted, (excluding week-old leftover pizza, or that time I waited three months to get my faucet leak fixed.) I am, generally speaking, pretty good at not squandering professional opportunities, flaking on entire friendships, or letting any chance at free food and alcohol pass me by. But as wasted ambitions go, I have long since admitted to myself a certain dropping of the ball when it comes to one thing: my wholly underutilized Spanish major.
Whenever I tell people I majored in Spanish (alongside the more appropriately chosen journalism), they mostly want to know two things: a) Did I study abroad? and b) Am I still fluent?
The answer to a) is no—I was perhaps the only Spanish major in my year to not go overseas, for reasons I could outline as pragmatic but really boiled down to anxiety about traveling, not wanting to lose my internship, and preferring to stay in New York and drink with my friends. (I was 19; cut me some slack.)
But the answer to b) is a little more complex. It’s true that at one time I had a shockingly strong grasp of Spanish, and could raise my hand and rattle off impromptu answers to complicated questions without having to stop and translate my thoughts from English. I could write in the language almost flawlessly, and excluding some difficulty with speed—native speakers talk about a thousand miles a minute—was pretty adept at understanding it as well, a skill I used primarily to watch telenovelas and eavesdrop on people’s conversations.
These days? I still remember a lot, but my ability to speak fluently has been reduced to about three tenses. The 20-page papers with which I secured my Spanish professors’ approval are now full of vocabulary I’ve long since forgotten, and other than the occasional soap opera—where any gap in understanding is made up for by long pauses and overtly dramatic facial expressions—my ability to understand spoken Spanish has all but disappeared.
It is perhaps by virtue of this wasted skill that I found myself appreciating Leaving the Atocha Station, the debut novel from 33-year-old Ben Lerner. Adam, Lerner’s protagonist (whose background bears a striking resemblance to the author’s), is studying in Spain as part of a fellowship, in which he is theoretically writing an elaborate poem about the effects of the Spanish Civil War, but is in fact spending most of his time drinking, meandering, and getting lost in his own self-indulgent thoughts. Adam pegs himself as something of a fraud: a Spanish student who doesn’t speak Spanish, a poet who can’t write poetry, and a great thinker perpetually fearful that his great thoughts are little more than nonsense. Continue reading “A Profound Experience of Art”
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