Words and Human Community

 The Glory of Language

Marilynne Robinson is an accomplished novelist.  She is also a teacher of literature and creative writing.  In her most recent book of essays, When I was a Child I Read Books, she reflects on how her library has become her community--a community which encompasses human beings from ages past. 

I love the writers of my thousand books.  It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent.  I love the large minority of writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle.  All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 21.]

It is an amazing and humbling matter to be part of a community of ages and be able to interact with, argue, debate, discuss, and think with members of our species who have lived hundreds and thousands of years before us.  They, of course, could scarce conceive of us; we, however, know of them.  They are part of the fabric of our lives.

Here is where the inestimable richness of a liberal arts education begins to appear.
  Moving beyond "interest and utility" to participation in a timeless human community is without price.  Being part of that community and also participating in the redemptive purposes of God within that community in saving the world, remaking it after the image of His only begotten Son, is a still greater, quantum boon. 

It is human language, of course, which enables this timeless community to exist and persist. Language is one of the greatest of God's gifts.  Language, says Robinson, is a grand collaboration:

We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.  We can and do make small and tedious lives as we sail through the cosmos on our uncannily lovely little planet, and this is surely remarkable.  But we do so much else besides.  For example we make language. 

A language is a grand collaboration, a collective art form which we begin to master as babes and sucklings, and which we preserve, modify, cull, enlarge as we pass through our lives.  Some students in France drew my attention to the enormous number of English words that describe the behaviour of light.  Glimmer, glitter, glister, glisten, gleam, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine and so on.  These old words are not utilitarian.  They reflect an aesthetic attention to experience that has made, and allows us to make, pleasing distinctions among, say, a candle flame, the sun at its zenith, and the refraction of light by a drop of rain. . . .

One of the pleasures of writing is that so often I know that there is in fact a word that is perfect for the use I want to put it to, and when I summon it it comes, though I might not have thought of it for years.  And then I think, somewhere someone was the first person to use that word.  Then how did it make its way into the language, and how did it retain the specificity that makes is perfect for this present use? 

Language is profoundly communal, and in the mere fact of speaking, then writing, a wealth of language grows and thrives among us that has enabled thought and knowledge in a degree we could never calculate.  As individuals and as a species, we are unthinkable without our communities.  (Ibid., p.21f)