The Best Something

Economics, in the end, teaches very little that is not a lesson in suspicion of numbers. Six percent growth: against which year, which base, whose prices? A cheap phone: cheap beside what, and cheap for whom? Nothing arrives naked. Every figure comes trailing an invisible second term, and the discipline consists largely in learning to see it, because the term you cannot see is the one deciding what the term you can see means.

Ordinary speech runs on the same principles and delivers the sentiment successfully. When you call something the best, you have not described the thing at all. You have described its position among others, and the others go unnamed. Best in this school. Best in this town. Best of the ones I happen to have tried. A superlative is a fraction whose denominator has been quietly rubbed out, and whoever holds the eraser decides what the numerator is worth.

There is a family of words like this. A big flea is not a big animal; a good burglar is not a good man; in each case the adjective refuses to be lifted off its noun and stood upright on its own. Best belongs to that family, and is the most dangerous member of it, precisely because it sounds like a verdict rather than a measurement.

So there is a question worth putting to the word every time it appears, and most urgently when it appears about you: best out of what? Ask it twice in succession and the word begins to dissolve.

We go on using it, and I understand the temptation. It is brief. The best student award is considerably less cumbersome than the better-than-everyone-else-in-this-particular-grade-in-this-particular-building award. And brevity is not its only virtue: the phrase does something the accurate version cannot, which is to tell a fourteen-year-old that she has been noticed, and to hand her a shape to keep growing into. That is not a small gift. But it is not a free one either, and the thing sacrificed in the compression is the only part that gives any information at all.

For an award is a signal, and a signal is worth exactly as much as your knowledge of the field it was drawn from. Tell a girl she is the finest Spanish speaker in the school and withhold the names of everyone she was measured against, and you have handed her a result with the denominator torn off. Would you applaud the prize for best Spanish speaker in a building full of Germans? You might, and that is the whole difficulty, because you cannot see the room. Nor has anyone much reason to show it to you. A superlative costs an institution nothing and purchases a grateful student, so the transaction is efficient for everybody except the person it is ostensibly about. She walks out believing she is the best at her subject. What actually occurred is that she was competently good among forty.

Then comes the university, where every person in the seminar carries the same certificate out of the same kind of building, and something in her gives way. This is usually called burnout. I do not think that is what it is, or at any rate not most of it. I think the arithmetic was always going to arrive eventually. Any extreme result is compounded of ability and accident, and the smaller the group, the larger the accident's share. To finish first among forty is partly a fact about who else was born in your town that year, and that species of luck does not follow you across a border. Widen the field and the accident washes out; what remains is nearer your true level, which is generally good, occasionally exceptional, and almost never the figure you were given. Nobody thought to warn her that the number would move. So when it moves she concludes that she has broken. She has not broken. She has, for the first time in her life, been measured honestly.

And the recession does not stop there, which is the part that goes unsaid. Suppose she holds on; suppose she becomes the finest Spanish speaker at a German university, chosen from among all the others who were the finest Spanish speakers at their German schools. Is she now better than a Spanish girl at a Spanish university, in Spain, who has been speaking Spanish to Spaniards since she was two? Nothing is impossible. But there is always a further room, and in the last room of all there is always somebody for whom the thing you were decorated for is merely the way she asks for bread.

I have kept to students because they make the case legible, but the word does this everywhere, and it does its worst work in the places one would least like to examine. Someone once called me her best friend, and I received it as a permanent fact about my person. It is not a permanent fact about anybody. It means: of the friends presently available to me, you are the finest. And folded inside that, unspoken, patient: until you are not, and until someone arrives whose best-ness exceeds yours. The sentence never lied to me. I simply failed to read the clause that had gone missing, the same clause that goes missing every other time the word is used, and I built a portion of myself on the part that was never there.

So if you are the best somewhere, you are the best there, among them, for now. I am not trying to take it from you. I am trying to show you its true dimensions, which are smaller than the word suggests and more useful than the word allows. A rank you can forfeit by boarding a train was never a description of you.

What deserves your allegiance is the other kind of thing. Some goods exist only through others going without: rank is the purest of them, incapable of being shared or enlarged, so that if everyone ascends, no one has ascended at all. But the Spanish you can actually speak obeys no such law. Neither does the work you can actually do. Nobody is required to lose it in order for you to keep it, it is indifferent to which room you carry it into, and it is the only portion of the prize that was ever genuinely in your hands.

And if you are not the best something, I would tell you to rejoice, except that rejoicing sounds glib in the mouth of anyone not currently suffering. What is true is liberation. You are unbound. You are permitted to be visibly bad at it for as long as it takes, which is the sole route by which anyone has ever become good at anything, and you are permitted to set it down altogether and go and discover what else you contain.

I will not tell you that you are not competing. You are, and the pretence that you are not is precisely how people are ambushed at eighteen. What I will tell you is that the loss of a position and the loss of a possession are entirely different events which feel identical from within, and that learning to distinguish them is most of the work of a life. So it does not matter that you are no longer somebody's best friend, somebody's best friend was never who you were.