Night time is one of the worst seasons of the day for me, and unfortunately, I experience it, on average, just about every sixteen hours or so. The issue I take with night has to do with darkness—I don't trust it. With darkness, unfamiliarity emerges; it brings with it a new reality—one that demands trust in structures that I find familiar—the length of my walkway, the number of stairs to my basement door, and the height of the light switch on the wall. The poet/monk, Thomas Merton, once wrote a piece called “Fire Watch,” a piece where he describes walking through his Kentucky monastery at night, watching the distant hills for brush fires, and allowing the silence of the darkness to speak to him in the way that the day does not. Thomas Merton is great and all, but he stumbled into a fan blade in the middle of the day and died. Who knows what he would have done to himself had he kept staying up at night.

The fact is that nighttime changes us and how we perceive the world around us in a critical way. I find this sort of change to be similar to what people experience when they acquire a foreign language. Seventeenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Von Humboldt believed that our reality is bound by language. For Humboldt, language provides us with a means to view the world, yet the world itself can only really be seen through language. Our verbal reality is not only tied to our world, but it causes us to see reality in certain ways. This idea is made clear by that common saying that the Inuit nation has many words for snow, a comment which is often followed in my area by the complaint that Vancouverites should have just as many words for rain. Reality as we know it—a rainy reality, in the case of Vancouver—requires expression.

In this way, language acts like window helping us to see the things going on around us. For instance, I live in a basement, so my window looks up onto a sidewalk. Often, I watch people walk by on the street—some of whom I've just discovered are my students who like to watch my husband and I cook dinner at night. I see a certain, specific view of the street through that window.

But what happens when you add another language to your first? In essence, you add another pane to your window. This new pane isn't so clear at first. When you begin to learn a new language, the extra “pane” you are looking through when you attempt to use a language makes reality appear blurry. When you lack vocabulary and grammar to express what you understand to be reality, you may find yourself disoriented, as if night has fallen outside. However, this darkness does not last for very long as the language becomes illumined in your mind with practice. As words are learned and verbs are conjugated, as you spend increasingly longer periods of time with the language, the darkness lifts. It is as if the new pane—instead of obscuring your vision as it did at first—clears. It now adds another dimension to your outlook, providing a wider view of reality.

Let me provide you with a few examples of this idea. When I'm not waxing philosophical, I spend the rest of my leisure time teaching English as a Second Language, a hobby for which I also happen to receive compensation. When students enter our school, they are asked to write a few sentences describing themselves. Here is one of my favourite descriptions:

“I’m looks like Asian face
And my eyes is dark cats eyes.
And looks like policemen.
My hairstyle is basketball looks like.”

I told this student, and truthfully so, that his work sounded like poetry (a term that took about five minutes to explain). His work is moving in several directions at once, beginning with conjunctions and moving in and out of preferred structures of language. Right now, this young man—working with limited grammar and vocabulary—sees through a new pane, but it's blurry. Only a few things are illumined. In his case, cat's eyes and basketballs are the only things clear enough in his view of English with which he can compare his facial features. He might actually see cat's eyes and basketballs within people's physiognomy, but probably not. Let us move onto another student's work that is a bit more sophisticated:

“My friends describe me as a somber and gloomy person who occasionally puts up a sunny face. But I think I am just normal. I have black hair and eyes, hollow cheeks, and a steep forehead. When I talk, I prefer to show a serious face. I also wear glasses most of the time. When I think, I usually put my hand under my chin so as to give an impression of a thinker (just kidding). In short, I am just a normal Joe.”