On Dictionaries: A Musing on Serendipity, Awe, and Precision

I am currently immersed in Alan Jacobs' essay collection Wayfaring.  I have admired his work for years, since I first encountered it at The New Atlantis.  One of my favorite nonfiction books ever is his A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, which challenged me greatly since I know so little of philosophy, but blessed me greatly both because of the challenge and because of the subject.  Wayfaring contains short essays on a mix of subjects from Harry Potter to Kahlil Gibran to trees to Christian faith and living to . . . dictionaries.

Jacobs is no Luddite.  However, he has wisdom and discernment, and he is properly thoughtful about new technologies and their possible unintended effects.  In "Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges," he explores the history of dictionary making and dictionary use.  Toward the end, he considers advantages of the online dictionary and its disadvantages; to my mind, and I think to his, the latter outweigh the former by quite a lot. 

"[T]he exhibition of sheer potential embodied in every dictionary," he writes, "only happens, it seems to me, when the dictionary actually has a [physical] body.  Surely every user of dictionaries or encyclopedias can recall many serendipitous discoveries: as we flip through pages in search of some particular chunk of information, our eyes are snagged by some oddity, some word or phrase or person or place, unlooked-for but all the more irresistible for that. [. . .] The great blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you're looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you're not looking for.  For that pleasure, it seems, we need books."

Later, Jacobs notes that someone has said that the linear text of books "narrows and impoverishes" our views (as opposed to hypertext).  However, he objects, "it turns out that, when it comes to dictionaries anyway, it's hypertext that narrows and impoverishes.  The simple fact that I cannot pick up a [physical] dictionary and turn to the precise page I wish, or even if I could do that, focus my eyes only on the one definition I was looking for -- the very crudity, as it were, of the technology is what enriches me and opens my world to possibilities.  Only when I hold the printed book can I be ushered into the world of sheer fascination with proliferating language that people like Maria Moliner and Samuel Johnson inhabited, and encourage us to inhabit."

I am reminded of a story one of my high school teacher friends once told me.  As they were working in the library one day, a student asked her what a word meant, so she referred him to the print dictionary in the reference section.  After a bit, she looked over to see him staring at it with a look of awe.  "I never knew there were so many words," he murmured to her.  

And the fewer of those words we know, the less able we are to think and talk and write precisely and well about our world.  I am constantly taken aback at complaints about how hard my college students found certain readings because of the vocabulary, when it is often nothing I and my peers had not encountered well before entering college.  And then the resistance to learning those new words . . . as if they are too impatient to learn, to know, as if they are content to stagnate at age 18.  

I am more of a Luddite than Jacobs and than most people I know, but certainly I acknowledge the benefits of much modern technology and use a fair amount of it.  However, I've often thought about what we lose in our rush to embrace every new wonder, because losses there must be.  Awe before the remarkable gift of language, the serendipity of discovery, precision -- these are losses, and, since language is our means of knowing and thinking about our world, one has to wonder how much loss we dare incur.  

Roger Kimball and Culture

I am reading Roger Kimball’s 2012 book of essays, The Fortunes of Permanence.  I’ve barely begun – just the preface (“Mostly About Relativism”) and the first essay, which is the title essay, so far – and I am as strongly impressed as I thought I would be.  (I have always enjoyed and appreciated Kimball’s work.)  I would like to write a thoughtful essay about his essay, but shall have to be content with lots of quotations for now.  So, from “The Fortunes of Permanence,” several quotations that probably won’t add up to his main point, but that particularly caught my attention as worth repeating.

Kimball writes about the sense in which culture is that which must be cultivated, but warns, in a paraphrase of Cicero:  “[E]ven the best care [. . .] does not inevitably bring good results [. . .].  The results of cultivation depend not only on the quality of the care but the inherent nature of the thing being cultivated.”

“Culture in the evaluative sense does not merely admit, it requires judgment as a kind of coefficient or auxiliary: comparison, discrimination, evaluation are its lifeblood.”  Here he quotes

Henry James:  “We never really get near a book [. . .] save on the question of its being good or bad, of its really treating, that is, or not treating, its subject.”  And Matthew Arnold:  criticism is “the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”

“The point is that culture has roots," Kimball writes.  "It limns the future through its implications with the past.  Moving the reader or spectator over the centuries, in [Hannah] Arendt’s phrase, the monuments of culture transcend the local imperatives of the present.  They escape the obsolescence that fashion demands, the predictability that planning requires.  They speak of love and hatred, honor and shame, beauty and courage and cowardice – permanent realities of the human situation insofar as it remains human.”

Writing about Huxley’s Brave New World, Kimball quotes a section in which the Controller tells the Savage that reading old works, such as those of Shakespeare, is prohibited merely because they are old.  And if they are beautiful, it is even more important that they not be read:  “Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things.  We want them to like the new ones.”

Why?  “Huxley’s brave new world is above all a superficial world." Kimball explains.  "People are encouraged to like what is new, to live in the moment, because that makes them less complicated and more pliable.”  Sensation is important, not substance (Dillard addresses this in The Writing Life:  “the life of sensation demands more and more”), and “experience is increasingly vivid but decreasingly real.  The question of meaning is deliberately short-circuited.”  As the Controller explains, “They [experiences] mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.”

“In part,” Kimball writes, “the attack on permanence is an attack on the idea that anything possesses inherent value.”

On the increasingly profane and crude displays in much of what passes for art these days, Kimball notes, “Hardly anyone is shocked anymore, but that is a testament not to public enlightenment but to widespread moral anesthesia.”  (He also quotes Chesterton as one of his chapter epigraphs:  “Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. . . . It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.”)

On technology:  “Welcome to the information age.  Data, data, everywhere, but no one knows a thing.”  Information is not knowledge.  We might be able to find information at the click of a mouse, but this comes with “a great temptation”:  “to confuse an excellent means of communication with communication that is excellent.  We confuse, that is to say, process with product.  As the critic David Guaspari memorably put it, ‘comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter’s rule.’  Oops.”

“The problem with computers is not the worlds they give us instant access to but the world they encourage us to neglect.”  The issue is not so much the developments of the “digital revolution” as “the effect of such developments on our moral and imaginative life, and even our cognitive and political life.”  (Note, please, he does not say technology is evil!)

On close and careful reading:  why memorize when quotations are instantly available?  “One reason, of course, is that a passage memorized is a passage internalized:  it becomes part of the mental sustenance of the soul.” 

He quotes Henry Kissinger at length:  “Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships.  You have to come to grips with who you are.  A leader needs these qualities.  But now we learn from fragments of facts.  A book is a large intellectual construction.  You have to struggle mentally to internalize it.  Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up on the computer. There is no context, no motive.  Information is not knowledge.  People are not readers but researchers, they float on the surface.  This new thinking erases context.”

Artists, your work is important, now, today, despite the chaos that threatens.  Kimball quotes from C. S. Lewis on the idea that we must wait for “normal” life to engage in cultural pursuits:  “Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right.  But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons.  They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. [. . .]  They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopoylae.  This is not panache; this is our nature.”

“Lewis’s meditation,” Kimball writes, “reminds us that culture, and the humanity that defines it, is constantly under threat.  No achievement may be taken for granted; yesterday’s gain may be tomorrow’s loss; permanent values require permanent vigilance and permanent renewal.”

Just Musing

A friend of mine, a high school teacher, wrote about a student needing to look up a word. She sent him to the library's print dictionary. When he opened it, she said that he stood staring, almost reverently, for a few seconds and then, in hushed tones, said, "There are so many of them!"

I laughed heartily, but it gave me pause. I grew up using print dictionaries, of course, and always found them fascinating, word lover that I am. Every time I needed a definition or a spelling, I was reminded of the huge numbers of words I didn't know, the amazing potential of the English language.

But today -- you just get on the web, look up the word in question at dictionary.com, and see . . . that word only, at most a couple more forms or similar spellings. No mysterious unknown words surround it to entice the eye and mind; no sense of how many words there are. We have reduced our sense of wonder and the potential to stretch our horizons.

The online thesaurus is as bad, really. You find a few more words there, a little more potential to become intrigued and follow the trail of this word, and then that one, and then another -- but still the actual number of words seen at any one moment is extremely limited. And the one niggling my mind, refusing to come forward, never does seem to be in the limited list, though I find it so often in the print thesaurus, over there on the facing page at the top, in a slightly different category . . .

Yes, yes, yes, benefits come from technology. I weary of saying this; anyone who knows me in the least knows that I joyfully benefit from many forms of technology every day. But there are losses with every new technology that comes our way, and someone ought to point this out -- and I do not think these losses are always merely acceptable trade-offs. We have more speed and convenience -- and so often lose wonder and mystery and a sense of awe.

And we lose even a clear sense of how the world works, sometimes, without any actual gains that I can see. Take digital clocks. All you see on a digital clock is this one exact moment, then another single exact moment, then another. There is no sense of the cycle of time with a digital clock. Sure, it's a mite easier to read a series of numbers than a dial face -- but does the series of numbers give a sense of the reality of time, that it circles from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day?

Where I teach there are digital clocks on the classroom walls. I hate them. I have to have my traditional dial-face watch to get through the hour. With a dial face, I have only to glance at it to see the hands and know how much time I have left. I don't need to know the time; I only need to see the minute hand just past the seven to know that I have a bit less than fifteen minutes left before class ends. I see the whole hour at once and know where within that hour I am; past and present and future all reveal themselves to me in that one quick glance.

But that digital clock tells me nothing of the time passed or the time left. It only tells me what this present exact moment is, forcing me to consciously process the time left. It says 9:36:41 (42,43,44,45 . . .), and how many minutes is that, what portion of an hour, until 9:50? Have I grown a bit more used to them over time? Of course -- but what is the cost to those who have known only the digital clock? Isn't it a reflection of our modern cultural insistence that the only thing that matters is the present moment? The past is gone and is therefore of no use to us; the future hasn't come and is therefore unimportant. Live for the moment without thought to what brought you to that moment or its influence on future moments.

Thoughtfulness -- that's all I really want. Just because something exists, just because something can be done, doesn't mean it's an unmitigated good. If we were thoughtful, we'd still use most modern technology, but maybe we'd use it better, with attention paid to possible losses, and maybe we'd attempt to mitigate those losses. And maybe there would even be times when we'd say "no, thanks; we don't need that." And that would be a marvel of wisdom.

Waterwalk

I've just read Steven Faulkner's Waterwalk, a memoir of his canoe journey from the upper North to St. Louis to "discover" the Mississippi with his son Justin, following the route of Marquet and Joliet. It's a good book -- Faulkner is a good descriptive writer, and his meditations on his relationship with his son are honest and thoughtful. There are days of lovely solitude, of excitement and near-disaster, of back-breaking boredom. There's history as he weaves the two journeys together. I found his discussions of environmental and technological issues a bit heavy-handed; even though I agee with quite a bit of what he says, it felt more like being preached at than reflective musing, which is what the rest of the book seems to call for. But despite that particular flaw (to me; others won't mind it), the book is well worth reading to encourage one to think again about the need to slow down, to see what's around us, to reflect, to try to connect with mind and heart instead of cell phone and Facebook. And, in the end, to remember that we can only know so much of any other created being, that we are mysteries even to ourselves, that wisdom can be passed on but must also be learned, each of us in his own unique journey. We may travel together for a time, but even together we may be in very different places; finally, we can only love and pray.

Technopoly

I've been slowly making my way through Neil Postman's Technopoly, sandwiching it between novels and other lighter reading. It's very good; everyone who promotes the indiscriminant use of technology (it exists, therefore we must have it) should read this book and give it some serious thought. One of his most salient points thus far (I'm only in chapter 3) is that we rarely are aware of the far-reaching implications of technological change -- it's not just the addition of tools, but it affects the very way we think and how we see the world. And he makes a good case for our having reached the point where we no longer ask why about technology but only how -- it now exists for its own sake and not for ours.

He acknowledges early on that those of us who suggest that technology is not necessarily an unalloyed good are seen as curmudgeonly folk who fear and hate all technology -- which is obviously absurd, as we all use and benefit from technology each day. I know of no one who seriously wants to go back even to medieval Europe, say, much less live in a truly technology-free culture (even soap is technological!). Postman writes in response to this allegation, "My defense is that a dissenting voice is sometimes needed to moderate the din made by the enthusiastic multitudes." No kidding!

The line I really love from this first chapter, his apologia for the book, is this one: "A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away. The wise know this well, and are rarely impressed by dramatic technological changes, and never overjoyed."

So take that, technophiles. I'm not the only curmudgeon out here; in fact, I take Postman as pretty good company (and a lot better writer and broader thinker).

And no, I don't look forward to the mandated upgrade to Vista in my workplace. I'm quite content with all the familiar bugs and irritations of XP, thank you very much, and do not care to have a new set of them forced on me. And yes, I very well might be induced to go back as far as electronic typewriters, if I could ever learn how to type without fifty errors a paragraph.