Susan Hitch
Linguist and Broadcaster
As an academic, Susan has written on Alfred the Great’s ninth century programme of translating important books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon English, and on women’s writing in the Renaissance. But her curiosity about languages and how language itself works goes back further in her own life, to a childhood in Japan, Cuba, Greece and Germany, travelling between places and between language; later she lived in Algeria, Brazil and Poland.

Language is the means by which we place ourselves in a time and culture, whether we’re learning – as children, or migrants, or travellers – or speaking a language which is already our own. Our language gives us an identity which usually feels as natural to us as the breath we use to speak it. And yet we can also use it to ask questions about who we are, to reconsider, remake and relearn. That has been the focus of Susan’s work as an academic: King Alfred using newly translated books to build national identity, the literate Protestant women of Seventeenth Century England recognising the power of writing and using it distinctively. Questions of language and identity are not only historical and academic: Susan continually meets these questions in the human rights-based work of the Sigrid Rausing Trust of which she is a trustee.

I was most struck by the idea of ‘zen-like oblivion’ that Jonathan Cole referred to, which I relate to something akin to the notion of a fully realised dancing state. (I wonder if this is something we can ever ‘achieve’? Or just something we sense and catch glimpses of?).

Jonathan described how when we experience pain, it become the whole focus of our consciousness. We identify entirely with the pain: we are the pain. He went onto describe the moments in physical activity when the thought process and the physical act can conjoin into a similar state where we and the activity become one thing – such as in long distance running. He referred to this state as the ‘zen-like oblivion’. This really excited me as the process in which we were engaged included a lot of thinking and questioning of our movement that for me can at times take me out of my physical expression. However, this idea allowed me to see a possible plateau in the process where the clarity of thought and intention and the physical expression can become interdependent and perhaps even integrated.

In other words, I found it helpful to use this idea to conceptualise a potential culmination point in my process where thought and action where integrated (but not necessarily merged).