The Linguist and the Emperor Read Online Free PDF

the tragedies that turn in on themselves—

    The living are killing the dead.
    The dead are killing the living.

    —in Greek a single phrase which expresses both meanings at once, the words themselves intertwining, as inseparable as the crimes of the past and present to which they refer.
    More gifted than his hard-working brother, Jean François is able to remember long phrases and grasp difficult grammatical concepts after hearing them just once, astonishing Jacques with his facility. What his older brother has taken endless pains to learn, Jean François picks up with ease. He is a prodigy, Jacques quickly sees. When the older brother returns to Grenoble, he makes further sacrifices and finds the money for Jean François to be enrolled in school.
    But if Jean François is an
enfant prodigue,
he is a temperamental one. He hates the discipline of his new school. He gets into fights with the other boys there every day. He becomes lazy and refuses to study anything. His head is filled with scenes from antiquity. Called upon to divide ten by two, to know the population of Figeac, to jump over a low hurdle, to spell his own name, he cannot.
    Letters go back and forth between Grenoble and Figeac, between Jacques and Jean François, who appeals to his brother to let him live with him in Grenoble.
    His brother answers, “If you want to come and live with me, you must study. An ignorant person can achieve nothing.”
    The boy says he cannot study what does not interest him: It has no meaning for him. What he does care about, he devours, obsessed. He begins to see that the world was old even in the first centuries, with exhausted oracles and gods who have ceased to speak.
    He becomes preoccupied with time, with first beginnings, an endlessly receding horizon.
And before that? And before that?
he asks his brother like a child—relentlessly—but also like a philosopher. And with these insistent questions, he begins to stumble upon his fate, the life’s work that will one day be his.
    And before Christ?
    The gods of Olympus, serene in beauty and power.
    And before them?
    Brutal monsters, the Titans—giants who howl with fear and rage as they devour their young.
    And before that?
    The earth and sky which for the Greeks always existed—but which the Hebrew God created from nothingness, from a single word,
Yehee!, Let there be!,
uttered in the darkness of endless night.
    But still there is something
before that, before the Greeks and Hebrews,
something prior, preceding and half-forgotten like a dream or an hallucination: There is Egypt. Working his way back through the many moments in Egyptian time, first Arab, then Christian, Roman, Greek, Persian Egypt, Jean François arrives at the Egypt of the Pharaohs, dynasty after dynasty of rulers whose glory and splendor dazzled the world for millennia (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) before beginning to wane one thousand years before Christ. For when Athens was just a patch of rock-strewn ground and Jerusalem a crude Jebusite fortress; when Rome was a forest haunted by wolves, great pyramids and temples had already risen on the banks of the Nile.
    The monuments, perfect in form and massive in size, are a measure of Egypt’s power. And the inscriptions with which they are covered are a measure of her wisdom: the writing which the Greeks call hieroglyphs, holy carvings, and which the Egyptians call “the words of the gods.” Fantastic pictures of walking jars and beasts with human bodies, a jumble of drawings: humpbacked vultures, squatting children, flowers and fruits, stars and palm trees and bald-headed priests, women giving birth, and male members spilling seed or urinating.
    But what can they mean, these “words of the gods”? Their significance has been forgotten in the long course of time. “Speeches from the grave,” the hieroglyphs will be called even in Roman times when there are still a few old priests who understand them. “The language of the dead,” the Emperor