I’m Emerset Farquharson, I grew up in São Paulo and Toronto, finding stories, narratives, and identities within the spaces and people I met.
One thing I learned growing up between languages was the way different languages have their own ways of expression. So some thoughts became easier to express in one language over another. And this affects the way I think in one language or another.
One day my younger brother, who was twelve at the time, expressed to me how limited language is, and how exasperating it was to be limited to the words of a language to express yourself. Years later, I learned that this was the thesis of the language philosopher Wittgenstein (“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”). Some years after this, I learned that this was a central idea of Buddhist thought. (“words are just fingers pointing at the moon, if you focus on the fingers, you will never see the moon”). So maybe we’re not always standing on the shoulders of giants, maybe we’re sometimes standing on each other’s shoulders, and discovering something that had been discovered hundreds and thousands of years ago.
It takes time to learn and to unlearn but all we have is the time we inhabit.