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one who played it, of course. Quixotry , derived from an old Spanish novel. A furious Williams refused to accept it until it had been double-checked in two different dictionaries. Whether because he genuinely didn’t believe it or just didn’t want to concede the ridiculous score it gave me—365 points on that single word, was it?—I don’t know.
    I’ve never lost a game of Scrabble in my life. Not ever, since my first-ever game against my mother when I was eight years old.
    Looks like I’ve brought up a right little philologist. You and words are just made for each other. I remember my mother saying this to me when I was a teenager. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, but it was certainly true that I always had a certain affinity for words. I remember thinking it was both strange and hilarious that a few little words could change a person so completely. People could become enraged by words or brought to tears, or have their emotions buffeted this way and that. Words were so interesting .
    I never saw words as a mere means of communication. What I mean by that is that I didn’t just “see” words, but I also felt them, viscerally, their weight pressing down on me as if they were matter. To me, words didn’t just connect people, words bound people, restricting and regulating their actions in very real and meaningful ways, even if the people using the words were completely oblivious to this fact. I sensed this, just as a mathematician could conceptualize and grasp an imaginary number as clearly as a real one. They say that physicists don’t think in terms of words, and that Einstein didn’t arrive at his Theory of Relativity just by stringing together words and formulae. Rather, it all just came together in a much simpler place, a primeval space, outside the scope of human language and number systems.
    I can sort of relate to this. I perceive words as a sort of landscape. It’s hard to explain the feeling to other people. After all, it relates, in a most fundamental way, to how I perceive the world around me. And what people perceive as “real” varies from person to person, mind to mind. The ancient Romans never debated the meaning of taste or color, for example.
    Just as I can conceptualize words, there are people who can conceptualize and relate to abstract concepts such as “nationhood” and “race.” I could no longer do this myself, probably because I was jaded by a job that essentially came down to killing people for the sake of this very same “nation.” Maybe the words were just too overwhelmingly powerful for me, who knows? All I knew was that words such as nationhood , race, and community were just that, as far as I was concerned—words. And even if I could conceptualize them as words, they weren’t concepts that I could relate to my real, everyday existence.
    A corollary to this was that people who did have their own vivid, holistic idea of what a word like nationhood meant could do my thinking for me. These people would be part of the establishment, Langley or Fort Mead or Washington, thinking hard about what nationhood meant and ordering me to kill people on its behalf.
    I’m sure that the same went for the leaders of the various insurgencies in the country that we were now in. They had the ability to perceive that “their country” and “other countries” were distinct entities, and this enabled them to act accordingly. After all, if you couldn’t draw a line between “us” and “them,” how could you label anyone the “enemy”? Oh, sure, it was easy enough when someone was physically in front of you, threatening violence, a clear and present danger. But to demarcate clear boundaries along the lines of race or religion, and moreover to label anyone on the wrong side of the “us and them” divide as enemies worthy of being killed? That took some serious willpower, or at least a concerted effort to conceptualize “reality” in a very specific way.
    After all, no