El Paso, Texas 79912 June 11, 2014 David Sedaris 12 Western Avenue Petaluma CA 94952 USA
Dear Mr. Sedaris, I thank you for reminding me of how much I suffered through my high school music theory class. Languages of any sorts with the exception of perhaps, math hold no comparison to chords and clefts, at least French and all the other Germanic languages share the same alphabet and the occasional word such as restaurant or entrepreneur might make a crossover to English. Music theory was akin to spelling words without any knowledge as to how individual letters sounded or what the meaning of the word I had pieced together meant. I was creating much discord on my staff paper because of my musical illiteracy despite playing cello for 7 years previous to the class. No semblance of harmony was to be found in my musical compositions, in fact if the botched phrase me talk pretty someday was to be transposed to sound it would sound a lot like my music. Your mention of an occasion when you struggled to fill in the blank with something that made sense and revealed a semblance of your identity and it ending up in you settling for Just give me a moment while I strap on my wooden leg, brought to mind how much of a pity I though, that I had all of these beautiful melodies frothing up inside of my head, but I was SEVERELY limited by my musical illiteracy and could not convey them. On a more contemplative note, a thought arose upon reading another of your experiences in which you became afraid to speak French at all, I fear that a sense of unity among people is lost to us because of the stigma attached to speaking a less than perfect form of a language, thus discouraging communication and by extension discouraging people from making connections across cultures. The ability to understand a language as you said, allows for the world to open to us, this statement struck me with the thought that progress is dependent upon literacy, that people cannot convey or protect their identities and ideas without understanding how to and effectively. A firm grasp on the language of anything is vital to enriching ones life experiences as well as in the pursuits of being able to talk pretty someday or being able to music really well.