British Council The Invention of Nothing

Текст песни "British Council — The Invention of Nothing"

My husband is a very important man. He is a scholar. That means he studies things. All kinds of things. He studies science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy, as well as other things. At least, he tells me that he studies them.

To me, it seems that he spends more time sitting in a café talking to other scholars. I don’t know if they are studying or not. To me, it looks like they are chatting. But I don’t know, I’m only a woman. I look after our family, and I am not a scholar. I do not go into the café in town and spend hours talking with other men. I stay at home and look after our children and prepare food. When I am not preparing food or looking after children, I like to read books. I like to read books of adventure stories, of traveller’s tales, of poetry. I like books that make me wonder and be amazed at the world we live in. I like books that take me far away from our town and the desert on one side and the sea on the other.

We live in a town that lies between the sea on one side, the desert on the other, and a river to each side of us. They call our country Mesopotamia, the land between rivers. Because our town is a port, and because it has two rivers, there are often many people from other lands here. My husband says he meets men from India, from China, from Europe and from Africa. People from all over the world come to our town. Often they come to buy or sell things, but they also come to talk, to meet other people, to share ideas and opinions, to think about different ways of seeing the world. When a lot of people from different countries and different cultures meet, new ideas are born.

At night I lie awake on our bed thinking. “What are you thinking about?” my husband asks me. “Nothing” I reply. My husband shakes his head in despair. “Women!” he says. “They think about nothing!”

My husband often brings back books when he goes to his meetings with other scholars. He stays awake at night pretending to read them. I say “pretending” because I know he doesn’t read them really. Sometimes I go in to his study late at night and I find him asleep, snoring with a book open in front of him. When I wake him up he says how interesting the book he’s reading is. I ask him to explain it to me, to tell me about it, but he says that women don’t understand such things. I let him go back to sleep and take the books for myself.

Some of them are very interesting. There are collections of stories from all around the world. They make me think. They make me think about lots of things. And the books about arithmetic from Greece and India, and the books about astronomy and navigation from Europe and Africa, they make me think about nothing.

“How many numbers are there?” I ask my husband. He likes it when I ask him questions. It makes him feel wise and intelligent.
“Nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine” he answers.
“And if I add one more?”
“Then the world will end” he says. I don’t believe him.
“How many stars are there?” I ask him. He doesn’t know. “Where does the land end and the sky begin?”, “What happens if a ship sails until the end of the sea?”
My husband can’t answer any of my questions. He thinks I’m stupid because I ask them.
“Is ‘nothing’ a number?”
“Of course it isn’t!!” he replies. “How can ‘nothing’ be a number? If a merchant has five horses, then he sells five horses, how many horses does he have?”
“No horses, but lots of money.”
“If I buy ten aubergines from the market, then I eat ten aubergines, what do I have?”
“A fat stomach”.
We laugh. He thinks I’m stupid.