An inability to meet expectations: straining to compensate for lost words.

Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria⁩ 2016

A hairdresser once described my hair as deceitful, which did, I believe, require more explanation. This came during my first and only visit to her cramped salon in Sofia. She had made a kind exception to normal business hours and unlocked the front door after hearing my knock. Because we didn’t share a common language, this cut demanded gestures, slowed expressions, and a bit of imagination to uncover whether our words just might intermingle among language families. Somehow the word deceitful emerged midway through—clear, enunciated, spoken like any confident yet disappointed English speaker. Where that word lurked within her mind, and how it came to her lips, was a mystery to us both, but we can probably thank Hollywood, or American foreign policy, or even a few international pop songs for the vocabulary required to describe thicker than expected hair. In the end, my hair got its badly needed trim, for better but mostly worse.

What intrigues me, as I write this a few years later, is how we both felt slight pangs of guilt. A guilt that was clearly unreasonable, ridiculous, and futile, but that still persisted.

She was cheery and gracious from the moment I rapped my knuckles on her locked door, but I also noticed how she rushed around the room with a nervous eagerness. She switched on lights and switched off the radio and hurried to sweep an already swept floor. Just below her courteous smile was frustration at her inability to understand my language. Whether that came from the frustrations of a business owner struggling to assist a client, or whether that desire came from simply an enthusiasm to help—two reasons that might overlap—wasn’t, like much else, exactly clear.

She couldn’t have known, however, that her client also felt frustrated and at least a tad guilty, as that client considered himself a guest, or, more accurately, as the one unable to speak the language. When some people travel, they slip all too easily into believing that they’re being misunderstood: the truth is much closer to the reverse.

One unreasonable trait of mine is a desire to speak every language that I hear. This is probably a mixture of my interest in languages, my view on politeness, along with a smidge of hubris and my compulsion for understanding thrown into the pot. And those ingredients come together whenever I find my ears within reach of a foreign tongue, as I feel an imperative to speak the language of my neighbors, and this comes with a sensation that’s remarkably similar to guilt whenever I’m incapable. Guilt, quite obviously, is a peculiar reaction to this desire.

Spending time with someone who doesn’t share your language is a beneficial exercise—whether that occurs on a long flight or for a simple haircut. Almost immediately, your broader perceptions of the outside world shrink. Anything external to the conversation vanishes from your attention. You don’t hear those around you nor notice anything about the background. Your concentration is too isolated, your perceptions about the other person expand, and you strain to compensate for the lost words with anything that you can identify—gestures, expressions, tone, emphasis.

While you strain to understand, you also become more aware of your own movements and actions. You’re looking outward to comprehend while simultaneously recognizing that you’re being watched in the same manner. A novice traveller will sometimes exaggerate their intended meaning with large gesticulations, providing a parody of what’s wanted. But this typically makes them even more difficult to understand. Some people never learn how to whisper or how to mouth words across a room—the obvious secret to both is to speak normally, in the former at a lower volume, in the latter without making a sound. The mistake is to emote, to overplay the gesture, to stress the whisper or the silent words. Unless your profession is acting, there’s a good lesson in recognizing that performing these motions with exaggerations makes comprehension more difficult. The person listening to your whisper or watching your lips from across the room already possess the tools to decipher your meaning. What they must do, however, is concentrate on the perceptions that they normally ignore.

Yet this doesn’t explain how guilt emerges, or how an abrupt misunderstanding should ever lead to the sensation. In both cases above—the woman holding scissors, her shaggy client—what’s disjoined is desire and ability. The guilt seems to come from an inability to meet expectations for the other person: I wanted to understand her, she wanted to understand me. And perhaps the highest praise for guilt is that those expectations are completely internal: neither a sociopathic hairdresser nor an apathetic client would feel guilt.

There’s a useful line from Samuel Johnson—as you’d certainly expect—about guilt in his play Irene. In his telling, guilt “intimidates the brave, degrades the great.” Even if that’s a bit grandiose for the salon, it’s applicable on a smaller scale, too, among the many peccadilloes of life. For guilt can still intimidate or degrade—neither bravery nor greatness is required. What’s notable is that guilt is a tether. It holds back the brave and the great.

What comes to mind with guilt is a walk through the mud, a sluggishness, that tether described by Johnson. As an internal sensation, it’s an attempt to correct behavior, but the way forward isn’t always obvious. There’s no purpose in walking forever through the mud; once you’re in the muck, and you recognize why, it’s probably time to abandon that path. Leave it to Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray to fill in what’s been missing:

He did not know what to do, or what to think. Finally, he went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had loved, imploring her forgiveness and accusing himself of madness. He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.

Despite the ambitions of those we should disregard, guilt can’t be imposed. Nothing external causes the sensation. It arises as a personal, private corrective, one to learn from, and then drop.

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