The Miracle of Language (ft. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson)
Language is truly mind-boggling.
This entire multi-millennia process of how we’ve managed to encode bits of reality and subjective experience into sounds, then connect those to little lines and curves, and now use this system to disseminate ideas and information, worldwide, instantaneously.
The fact that you are reading these words right now is itself a miracle. The fact that I can take my thoughts, formulate them into collections of symbols, according to well-adopted rules, present them to you, and you can look at them, instantly decode the symbols and lift meaning from them.
Isn’t that the most amazing thing in the world?
And that’s not to even mention the thousands of human languages to have ever been devised and used. Nor the ever-evolving channels we’ve invented to spread these sounds and symbols: from copying by hand to the printing press, and to digital publishing, which brings down the cost of replicating content to essentially zero.
The spread of literacy and permeation of words into every corner of life — from street signs, ads, product labels, all the unread articles on your phone — means that the essential miracle of language has become invisible, 99% of the time.
But every now and then, a certain combination of words comes along and wakes you up, reminding you of the sheer gift that language even exists.
Bah, that sounds too fluffy to me, you say. Sure, language and words are useful, but what’s the big deal?
Here’s a question for you —
What do you think can be accomplished, or built, in 235 words?
Here are the two opening paragraphs of the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, published in 2004.
Please try to read it as slowly as you can, as if you’re reading a letter from a long-lost loved one.
I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! Because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.
It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything. If you’re a grown man when you read this — it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then — I’ll have been gone a long time. I’ll know most of what there it is to know about being dead, but I’ll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things.
In the span of 235 words, we have the following:
A short exchange, without any quotation marks, that depicts a scene between a father and child, without explicitly using either word. The passage shows us that the father is getting old, and is thinking about his death, the child he’ll leave behind, and the future life of that child. We also learn that he is a man of faith, and is close to the child’s mother.
More than that, we begin to hear the narrator’s voice, and intuit who he may be — a gentle, simple man who can speak easily about life and death, all with a touch of humor, grace, and acceptance.
No matter how many times I reread this passage, every time feels as fresh and startling as the first. It’s as if I’m watching a flower bloom before my eyes.
How the passage is composed
To understand how the writer constructs this passage, I wanted to tease out what language she uses to evoke various emotions.
I only looked at three kinds of feeling:
- A sense of connection, being close to someone else
- Humor
- Sadness from anticipating loss or loneliness.
I annotated the passage with a different color for each.
The passage weaves together these three strands, in that they almost alternate in a pattern: loss, connection, humor, loss, connection, humor…
But the prose fuses these feelings so naturally, that we take it all in at once.
This is how Robinson achieves such delicate nuance: she finds the smallest actions (child holding the father’s hand) and phrases (“as if that settled it”) to quickly tap into different emotional tones.
A review from The Weekly Standard describes this feat:
“In the sheer beauty of its prose and the fierceness of its passion, Gilead is a work of startling power: a seemingly simple artifice that reveals more complex and finer structures the closer we approach it. It is a subtle, gorgeously wrought, and immensely moving novel.”
If you found something worthwhile in the opening passage, you’ll enjoy rest of the novel.
To end, a few more inimitable lines from Robinson:
“There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?”
