Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

“Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language. It almost drove me crazy… until I learned to think in it—and that put a new ‘map’ of the world on top of the one I grew up with. A better one, in many ways—certainly a more detailed one.

“But nevertheless there are things which can be said in the simple Arabic tongue that cannot be said in English.”

Jubal nodded agreement. “Quite true. That’s why I’ve kept up my reading of it, a little.”

“Yes. But the Martian language is so much more complex than is English—and so wildly different in the fashion in which it abstracts its picture of the universe—that English and Arabic might as well be considered one and the same language, by comparison. An Englishman and an Arab can learn to think each other’s thoughts, in the other’s language. But I’m not certain that it will ever be possible for us to think in Martian (other than by the unique fashion Mike learned it)—oh, we can learn a sort of a ‘pidgin’ Martian, yes—that is what I speak.

“Now take this one word: ‘grok.’ Its literal meaning, one which I suspect goes back to the origin of the Martian race as thinking, speaking creatures—and which throws light on their whole ‘map’—is quite easy. ‘Grok’ means ‘to drink.’”

“Huh?” said Jubal. “But Mike never says ‘grok’ when he’s just talking about drinking. He—”

“Just a moment.” Mahmoud spoke to Mike in Martian.

Mike looked faintly surprised and said, “‘Grok’ is drink,” and dropped the matter.

“But Mike would also have agreed,” Mahmoud went on, “if I had named a hundred other English words, words which represent what we think of as different concepts, even pairs of antithetical concepts. And ‘grok’ means all of these, depending on how you use it. It means ‘fear,’ it means ‘love,’ it means ‘hate’—proper hate, for by the Martian ‘map’ you cannot possibly hate anything unless you grok it completely, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then and only then can you hate it. By hating yourself. But this also implies, by necessity, that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) that Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called a mild distaste.”

Mahmoud screwed up his face. “It means ‘identically equal’ in the mathematical sense. The human cliché, ‘This hurts me worse than it does you’ has a Martian flavor to it, if only a trace. The Martians seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that the observer interacts with the observed simply through the process of observation. ‘Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed—to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us as color means to a blind man.” Mahmoud paused. “Jubal, if I chopped you up and made a stew of you, you and the stew, whatever else was in it, would grok—and when I ate you, we would grok together and nothing would be lost and it would not matter which one of us did the chopping up and eating.”

“It would to me!” Jubal said firmly.

“You aren’t a Martian.” Mahmoud stopped again to talk to Mike in Martian.

Mike nodded. “You spoke rightly, my brother Dr. Mahmoud. I am been saying so. Thou art God.”

Mahmoud shrugged helplessly. “You see how hopeless it is? All I got was a blasphemy. We don’t think in Martian. We can’t—”

“Thou art God,” Mike said agreeably. “God groks.”

“Hell, let’s change the subject! Jubal, could I impose on my fraternal status for some more gin?”

“I’ll get it,” said Dorcas, and jumped up.

It was a pleasant family picnic, made easy by Jubal’s gift for warm informality, a gift shared by his staff, plus the fact that the three newcomers were themselves the same easy sort of people—each learned, acclaimed, and with no need to strive. And all four men shared a foster-father interest in Mike. Even Dr. Mahmoud, rarely truly off guard with those who did not share with him the one true faith in submission to the Will of God, always beneficent, merciful, found himself relaxed and happy. It had pleased him very much to learn that Jubal read the words of the Prophet and, now that he stopped to notice it, the women of Jubal’s household were really much plumper than he had thought at first glance. That dark one—But he put the thought out of his mind; he was a guest.

But it pleased him very much that these women did not chatter, did not intrude themselves into the sober talk of men, but were very quick with food and drink in warm hospitality. He had been shocked at Miriam’s casual disrespect toward her master—then recognized it for what it was: liberty permitted cats and favorite children in the privacy of the home.

Jubal explained early that they were doing nothing but waiting on word from the Secretary General. “If he means business—and I think he’s ready to deal—we may hear from him yet today. If not, we’ll go home this evening… and come back if we have to. But if we had stayed in the Palace, he might have been tempted to dicker. Here, dug into our own hole, we can refuse to dicker.”

“Dicker for what?” asked Captain van Tromp. “You gave him what he wanted.”

“Not all that he wanted. Douglas would rather have that power of attorney be utterly irrevocable… instead of on his good behavior, with the power reverting to a man he despises and is afraid of—namely that scoundrel there with the innocent smile, our brother Ben. But there are others besides Douglas who are certain to want to dicker, too. That bland buddha Kung—hates my guts, I’ve just snatched the rug out from under him. But if he could figure a deal that might tempt us—before Douglas nails this down—he would offer it. So we stay out of his way, too. Kung is one reason why we are eating and drinking nothing that we did not fetch with us.”

“You really feel that’s something to worry about?” asked Nelson. “Truthfully, Jubal, I had assumed that you were a gourmet who insisted on his own cuisine even away from home. I can’t imagine being poisoned, in a major hotel such as this.”

Jubal shook his head sorrowfully. “Sven, you’re the sort of honest man who thinks everybody else is honest—and you are usually right. No, nobody is going to try to poison you… but your wife might collect your insurance simply because you shared a dish with Mike.”

“You really think that?”

“Sven, I’ll order anything you want. But I won’t touch it and I won’t let Mike touch it. For I’ll lay heavy odds that any waiter who comes to this suite will be on Kung’s payroll… and maybe on two or three others’. I’m not seeing boogie men behind bushes; they know where we are—and they’ve had a couple of hours in which to act. Sven, in cold seriousness, my principal worry has been to keep this lad alive long enough to figure out a way to sterilize and stabilize the power he represents… so that it would be to no one’s advantage to have him dead.”

Jubal sighed. “Consider the black widow spider. It’s a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight.