I'm not sure I could have contributed anything really new. One of the beautiful insights in your book Lost in Translation is your description of coming to terms with the English language and finding a voice in that language. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise, my perceptions become. And such lucidity is a form of joy. Sometimes when I find a new expression, I roll it on the tongue, as if shaping it in my mouth gave birth to a new shape in the world.
Nothing fully exists until it is articulated.
So what we're hearing here as you chose writing and became a truly great writer is that same devotion to the craft that you had found in music. The main impact of immigration for me was my sense of the enormous importance of language. I think that for a while I was, in effect, without language, because Polish lost its relevance to this new world and there were very few people with whom I could speak Polish, and I hadn't yet come into English. And I understood that to be without language is to live in a very dim world, a very dim external world and a very dim interior world. Language is not only something that we use instrumentally, but it is something that truly shapes us, and that truly shapes our perceptions of the world.