I have always placed great stock in the value of words. Unfortunately, it seems that modern society is far less enamoured than I. In an age where neologisms abound in time with every new form of social media, when the soundbite, cut free from the drogue of any actual context, is king, when clickbait titbits lure us in like unsuspecting prey and even the simple pronoun is able to shift like sand beneath our feet, words have become mongrelised and destabilised immeasurably and yet, for all their unfashionable scruffiness, I still cherish them.
In my little study, the bookshelves groan with as many words as I can pack onto them. Not just any words these, though; due to limited space I am forced to consider them carefully, making difficult choices as to what to keep at hand at any given time so that I am able to maintain a balance of wisdom, humour, poignancy and wonder. Even just glancing up at the shelves now, whilst writing this, I realise that my collection is very likely unique. Even taking into account all those billions of people on the planet, with all the countless millions of writers and their trillions of books in the world, the assortment arrayed up there, above my desk, is as individual as a fingerprint and would likely give some visiting anthropologist an immediate insight into my personality and thoughts as though I had written a neat summary upon a board and pasted it to the wall.
The sense of balance and reason contained within my chosen word hoard is an equilibrium that seems sorely lacking from much of the vocabulary so freely and readily available, and so gratefully gobbled up by society these days. As a teacher, this fact is a major concern to me. I teach my classes about bias and hegemony, about audience interaction and skewed representations, but some days it feels that there is only so long that I can keep my finger wedged in the dyke as new leaks spring up all around me. As a parent, it frankly terrifies me.
Still, though it seems a Sisyphean task some days, I can come home to my little curated collection of voices and dip into their stories, their philosophies and their musings, drawing some small comfort from the feeling that, in the words of Paul Simon, “I have my books, and my poetry to protect me.” Chesterton, Frost, Seneca, Tolkien, Whitman and so many others in my eclectic rag bag of pages always seem to have their finger right on the pulse of whatever it is they wanted to say, their words weighted and based upon careful observation of everything around them, their voices so unique and never, ever simply a fragment of the passive flotsam that always seems to drift along upon the general hubbub and melee of populist opinion and coerced sentiment.
Like any avid reader I take them down from their shelves regularly, reading them, listening to them, even muttering something in response to a thought or idea across which I’ve stumbled, so that I become part of an endless unbroken general conversation between readers and writers, between schools of thought and, known or unbeknown, between writers themselves.
That’s an interesting thought though, isn’t it? Conversations between writers, whether like-minded or of opposing views, across time would, I think, be amongst the most illuminating interactions to have ever happened. Imagine if Shakespeare had spent an hour in the company of Arthur Miller, or Coleridge had spent an afternoon with Joseph Brodsky, what would they have made of the world as we now know it? I think, now, as I look up at the shelves above me, of how some of these conversations would pan out between neighbours on the shelves, those pairings thrown together by proximity and sheer random choice on my part.
In the top left-hand corner of the shelves the very first pairing throws up the prospect of an interesting interaction between Adrian Bell and Wendell Berry. Bell, the town boy who fled the prospect of offices and clogged-up streets to seek a farmer’s life in Suffolk, wrote widely and beautifully about the countryside, its lore and its traditions, many of which dated back hundreds of years. So much did he come to represent a sense of traditional Englishness that many British soldiers leaving to fight in World War 2 carried a copy of his book Corduroy, to remind them of their sentimental longings for a home for whose liberties and heritage they were fighting. I can imagine him turning to his shelf-neighbour Wendell Berry, that great Kentucky farmer, activist and exponent of all things small-scale and ecologically friendly. What would Bell make of the current state of affairs in world farming? What lessons might Berry glean from Bell’s early experiences as a novice apprentice in the fields? I have no doubt that if these two great farmer-thinkers were to put their heads together, they would come to some consensus that they would deliver with force and passion, perhaps even drawing in a few opinions on rural matters from Heaney and Herriot at the other end of the shelf, though they would no doubt be involved in other conversations themselves.
Not all match-ups would dovetail as neatly as this, with some offering the fruitful conversations borne from totally different experiences. Talking of conservation-mindedness, one such match-up comes in the form of two contemporary writers, John Moore and Joseph Mitchell. Walking, fishing, and an awareness of his relationship to the land around him and its traditions, all frequented Moore’s work in both book form and in his regular column in the Birmingham Daily Mail where he too banged the drum for conservation and an awareness of a life slipping away quietly as modernisation and twentieth-century attitudes began to take a firm hold upon the life of the British Isles. While Moore was roaming field and woodland, riverbank and farm, however, Mitchell was ambling around the dying carcass of old New York, taking in the sights, smells and sounds of its docks, shops, ghettos and derelict hotels whilst meeting very unique characters like Professor Seagull, chronicling his observations in those wonderful articles he wrote for The New Yorker. So many ideas in one place, so many things seen and lost!
One of the main charges levelled at reading and academia is the fact that it can seem somewhat insular in its aversion to the here and now, the reader preferring to trawl through the past, focusing on what’s been and gone instead of what’s going on under their noses. I’m not one of those who holds to this argument, however. It still amazes me how a good writer and thinker can be simultaneously of their time and yet timeless, their ideas and messages travelling seamlessly through the centuries, and to delve into the wisdom of books is also dealing with the here-and-now as, in those famous words recorded in the Book of Ecclesiastes (also up there on the shelves), “There is nothing new under the sun”. War, famine, love, laughter, suffering, they’ve always been around as long as humans have populated the planet; seasons come and go, regimes rise and fall, just as they have always done and as they will always continue to do, and all of it has been chronicled in the words of these writers.
Writing this now, I think of how you may come to read my ponderings in a different town, another country or even on some distant continent, which in turn leads me to think also of the words I have yet to write, those untold stories that may be written in years to come by writers not yet born and even those stories that, sadly, will never be told, for whatever reason. For something so ancient and primal as the written word, the possibilities are endless and so, because of this, I will go on believing, as I always have, that, in a world that places so much value in being front and centre, in being the focus of attention and the star of the short video, what really matters is simply being part of that endless and enduring conversation that continues quietly in life’s margins.
