The Commonplace Book Project
Words Can Be Like X-rays
Aldous Huxley on the power of words.
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
The thing is — X-rays don’t really know good from bad.
There’s the good kind of pierced. Where you read a story and it shifts something in you for the better. It makes you see more clearly, maybe. Or makes you feel less alone in the world.
And there’s the bad kind. Usually this is reserved for things like blog posts or comments or things that show up on social media feeds. Something that someone writes from the safety of behind the Internet veil. Usually words they wouldn’t say to your face.
As writers, we know that words matter. They’re powerful. They’re the closest thing we have to real magic.
Like Huxley said, they go through anything.
They make it so that human beings don’t have to start from scratch every generation. They making learning and teaching possible. They make connection across time and space and generations and even life and death possible.
Words can be a powerful balm. Or they can be a weapon.
