Long-Lived Are the Words
A word after a word is power.
A sketch after a sketch draws a language of its own.
A performance of truth is the quietest kind of courage.
I was reading an article by an essayist I first encountered in high school — possibly in this very magazine, though now I was reading it online, not on paper. I was sitting in the chair of my hairdresser, to whom it had taken me nearly two hours to get and return from — yes, the kind of motorway traffic caused by what the radio soothingly calls an incident. Maybe it was a flat tyre, if it was the same vehicle I passed crawling by. Coincidentally — or not — I had a nail in one of my own tyres and spent the better part of the precious time I had tried to save, inflating it to remain reasonably safe that Friday, only to be flung right back into the halted current of cars and the music of Classic FM, which very efficiently brings me back to my centre these days.
A digression? Perhaps. But the best stories circle their subject the way bees circle pollen, hovering, returning, carrying a little something from elsewhere. The truth, when it arrives, often does so sideways.
I had just finished reading a few paragraphs — having flipped from a book to the essay on my phone — when the author began praising his co-comedian, one half of my favourite comic duo. I had even mentioned them, fleetingly, in an essay exactly a year ago. Time folds like that.
This is when my hairdresser asked, “Did you hear about J.?”
“I was just reading his essay about her,” I replied. What a coincidence, I thought.
But then — what am I supposed to hear about her?!
Yes, I follow her (like 233K other people), though I haven’t exactly been keeping up to date. I hadn’t known. And that is how I learned that the person who once said, When a person speaks in a voice that isn’t their own, they eventually stop understanding themselves, suddenly died of cancer two days ago.
I think of what Toni Morrison, a novelist who won the Nobel Prize in 1993, once said:
We die. That might be the meaning of life. But we do language. That might be the measure of our lives.
Yes, we reach across time with it. And I think of what Czesław Miłosz, another Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, wrote in The Witness of Poetry:
Language is the only homeland.
The duchess of humour. Educators. Activists. Poets. Novelists. Mothers. Or all of them at once. And the book by one of the greatest novelists of our time, Elif Shafak (327K enthusiastic readers) that I’m reading at the hairdresser’s, ends with an inscription:
We weave poems, songs and stories out of every breath. May you remember us.
When language is used not just to perform but to reach, to comfort, to stitch a torn corner, it outlives even the voice that first gave it breath.