When every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right

The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.

– Vladimir Nabokov

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The true value of learned language

In a discussion of “translating” technical or scholarly concepts into common, ordinary language, C.S. Lewis identifies one of the chief values of  learned language:

In the very process of eliminating from your matter all that is technical, learned, or allusive, you will discover, perhaps for the first time, the true value of learned language: namely, brevity. It can say in ten words what popular speech can hardly get into a hundred. Your popularisation of the passage set will have to be very much longer than the original.

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Everyone still needs and uses words

Given the significance ascribed by the Bible to speech in establishing and defining relationships, given the theological connection between the Word, hearing the Word, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the response of faith, and given the centrality of the pulpit and the words of God for the Reformation project, any attempt to marginalise or reduce the importance of words today must be seen as a theological act and not as a straightforward and value-neutral accommodation to current criteria of successful communication. …

Whatever the trendy evangelical gurus tell me about the fact that Generation X does not respond to word-based messages, when I (or any other member of Generation X) go to the bank for a loan, the manager does not mime or dance before me; he or she explains in words what nature of our relationship is; and, if I do not initially understand, it is his or her job to initiate me into the rules of the linguistic game that is being played. Certainly, if I default on my loan, claims that I belong to a post-literary culture will not cut much ice with the legal establishment.

– Carl Trueman, “The Undoing of the Reformation”

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Those lovely odd things you’re not looking for

Surely every user of dictionaries or encyclopedias can recall many serendipitous discoveries: as we flip through pages in search of some particular chunk of information, our eyes are snagged by some oddity, some word or phrase or person or place, unlooked-for but all the more irresistible for that. On my way to “serendipity” I trip over “solleret,” and discover that those weird, broad metal shoes that I’ve seen on the feet of armored knights have a name.

But this sort of thing never happens to me when I look up a word in an online dictionary. The great blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you’re looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you’re not looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need books.

– Alan Jacobs, “Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges” in Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

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Refusing to don the armor of aestheticism

John Updike was widely reviled, and rightly so I think, for using the collapse of the World Trade Center towers as an opportunity for making beautiful sentences: “Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface,” he wrote in The New Yorker; one of the towers “fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air.”

Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic offered the most incisive critique of Updike’s approach: “Such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible.”

The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda made the same point in one of his poems: “and the blood of children ran through the street / without fuss, like children’s blood.” Neruda, among the most metaphorically extravagant of poets, knew that in this case metaphor or simile would be obscene.

Similarly, Charles Williams once wrote, “When the means are autonomous, they are deadly.” When the “means” of art, its various instruments, become detached from the human world of moral action and spiritual meaning, the damage they can do is beyond estimation. And yet the world is also full of people who, in their eagerness to tell the truth they see, ignore those instruments or employ them carelessly. It’s vital to attend to the world as it is, refusing to don the armor of aestheticism; it’s vital to use the “means” with the utmost skill and care, to be as vivid and elegant as possible. This is why writing is hard.

– Alan Jacobs, “Sentences” from Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

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The best description of the Oxford English Dictionary that you’ll read today

The world’s largest linguistic rummage sale

– from Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant by Alan Jacobs

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The sensual delight of reading good writing, all by itself

The strange bliss of reading is mysterious even to those who are most susceptible to it. I’m not speaking here of the pleasures of learning, nor of those to be had from being drawn into an exciting story, but simply of the sensual delight of reading good writing, all by itself.

This pleasure is in no way dependent on agreement with the author; consider that it may be possible to find a writer’s work gorgeous even when he is saying something plain awful.

– Maria Bustillos, “Reading Writers I Can’t Stand“

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Trying to play baseball in ice skates

At the same time, the endless versatility of English is what makes our rules of grammar so perplexing. Few English-speaking natives, however well-educated, can confidently elucidate the difference between, say, a complement and a predicate or distinguish a full infinitive from a bare one. The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin, which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether. Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball in ice skates. The two simply don’t match.

– Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way

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Totally abstract art stands in an undefined relationship with the viewer

In all forms of writing, both poetry and prose, it makes a tremendous difference whether there is a continuity or a discontinuity with the normal definitions of words in normal syntax. Many modern writers make a concerted effort to disassociate the language of their works from the normal use of language in which there is a normal definition of words and a normal use of syntax. If there is no continuity with the way in which language is normally used, then there is no way for a reader or an audience to know what the author is saying.

An artist can, of course, use language with great richness, fill his writing with figures of speech and hyperbole or play games with the syntax. The great artist often does this, going far beyond a merely rudimentary use of normal grammar and normal definition of words. And in doing so, he adds depth and dimension.

Shakespeare is the great example. We understand Shakespeare’s dramas because he uses enough normal syntax and normal definitions of words so that there is a running story and a continuity between the running story and all of the artistic devices he uses. We know what Shakespeare is saying not because of the far-flung metaphors and beautiful verbal twists, but because of the continuity they have with the story on the level of normal definition and normal syntax. There is a firm core of straightforward propositions.

What is true in literature is also true in painting and sculpture. The common symbolic vocabulary that belongs to all men (the artists and the viewers) is the world around us — namely, God’s world. That symbolic vocabulary in the representational arts stands parallel to normal grammar and normal syntax in the literary arts. When, therefore, there is no attempt on the part of an artist to use this symbolic vocabulary at all, then communication breaks down. There is then no way for anyone to know what the artist is saying. … 

Totally abstract art stands in an undefined relationship with the viewer, for the viewer is completely alienated from the painter.

– Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

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Before anything else

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

– W.H. Auden, “Squares and Oblongs”, as quoted in The Christian Imagination

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