Free The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg

shadings I’d lived by, all the little contradictions, were exposed in its vocabulary, drawn apart and fixed in place like moths on pins. Had I spoken Gravinic from the start, I thought, I could never have been so vain. Precision was vanity’s enemy. And while I knew that my heart still harbored certain pretensions, the occasional self-delusion, I was certain these too would disintegrate in light; as soon as I’d learned enough words.
    English, by contrast, was a rough and debased slang, a rickety, jury-rigged cant thrown together in a historical instant for less-than-noble purposes. When I spoke English it seemed impossible to get my nuances across, and so I spoke less. The Gravine and its language consumed my imagination as nothing had since my old dreams of New York. And the Gravine was better—for how likely was it that I would ever find a Gravinian to disillusion me?
    Julia didn’t know what to make of my newfound diligence; but she seemed guardedly pleased.
    â€œI like seeing you so worked up about something,” she said. “Maybe you’ve found your calling.”
    My calling! Lofty ideas like that made me shivery and nauseous. If I thought too long about them I broke out. But it was true that I had little inclination to do anything else.
    â€œCould be,” I said.
    I fell into a strict routine. Each night at six o’clock I would walk to the carryout at the corner and order from the scowling Greek there an egg salad sandwich for myself, and another dinner—it varied from night to night—for Julia. Then I returned to the apartment, settled myself at my makeshift desk, ate one half of my sandwich, and got down to work. On the left side of my desk was piled my output so far: hundreds of sheets of rag bond typing paper, twelve Gravinic sentences written on each in my narrow, exacting hand. I kept my page-in-progress on the right side of the desk, and my blank typing paper stacked on the floor to the right of my chair. My copy of Kaufmann’s Gravinic Philology lay heavily in my lap, the space on my desk being exhausted. And on the floor to my left sat the remaining half of my egg salad sandwich in its wax paper. This is how I worked: I would foray through the creaking, gold-bordered pages of Kaufmann until I came to whatever grammatical nicety I was wrestling with at the moment, and then, having settled the syntactic point, turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to retrieve the appropriate words, if they were there. If, as was often the case, they were not, I had to twist myself in my chair to consult the heap of supplementary dictionaries behind me on the floor. Finally I returned to the first section of Kaufmann to determine what morphological adjustments would be necessary. When I was satisfied that I had produced a grammatical Gravinic sentence declaring (or intimating, postulating, regretting) that its speaker had, at some particular moment, kicked in a particular manner a particular sort of dog which stood in some particular relation to the speaker, the kick, and the generalities of time and space—in all, a process of about five minutes’ duration—I committed my work to the sheet of paper at my right, with a red ballpoint pen, leaving enough space so that the page would hold just twelve sentences. If the sentencehappened to be the twelfth, I would pause in my work to read the whole page aloud, quite slowly, so that I had time to recall the exact phonetic value of each umlaut, hook, and slash. I added the page to the finished stack at my left and replaced it with a blank sheet from my pile on the floor. Then I rewarded myself with one bite of my sandwich. At the resulting rate of approximately one bite per hour, I finished my dinner at around midnight, at which point it was my custom and Julia’s to go to bed.
    There, she asked me about my night’s work, and made me recite from it; she laughed delightedly at my struggles with the unfamiliar