Words, Sentences, Books....

Carl Sagan is quoted as saying, "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you are inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

For those of you who do not know I am married to a woman who works as an elementary school librarian. She loves books and she loves children of all ages so the job is a very good fit. She is constantly reading books that she is considering for the school library (or that have been purchased but are unknown to her) before putting them on the shelf for children to read. We also have many, many other books in our home library from a variety of authors and genres. We all learned to enjoy reading a good (or even not so good) book from early in life. I don't know much about the man who I am about to quote here but, I love the quote;

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader." (Alberto Manguel, "A History of Reading").

I remember that day in first grade when my eyes were finally opened to the lifelong passion of reading.

I have seen in the eyes of my own children when the switch finally clicked closed and the images on those pages began to make sense.

The excitement of putting those characters together into words and again into sentences was mind blowing. Rudyard Kipling is quoted as saying, "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind". And from Mother Teresa, "Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless." Not so kind words can also be easy to speak and, as much as we hope to still the echoes, they seem also to endure.

There are several times in my life when I have spoken unkindly of another person. No thought given to the comment, simply the first thought into my head escaping through my lips. Once I spoke of a boy whom I had known in school and church for several years. He was a classmate of mine and I knew that he was not in the room at the time. What I had forgotten is that his Mother was teaching the class that day. My friends tried to stop me as I started to speak those words (they knew what was coming) but could not communicate to me quickly enough to forestall the insertion of my large foot into my small-minded mouth. The look of horror on her face is etched into my memory like very few other images. Likewise the feelings of shame and embarrassment at my folly are clear in my mind even today.

I wish I could report to you all that I have not ever fallen prey to the same trap as I did that day in my young life but, alas, there is at least one more incident that occurred during my older teenage years. My Junior year in High School I enjoyed the opportunity to participate in several world history and government classes. Many of my classmates became good friends that year. I remember one day having a discussion with several of those classmates prior to the beginning of class. Someone at the table said something about another of our classmates that, while on some level true, was very unkind. I chimed in with a comment of my own that was deeply hurtful to the individual - who had just sat down at the opposite end of our table. She immediately started crying and ran from the room. Another memory that I will not soon lose. Tempered only by the fact that I was able to find her later that day with a sincere apology. She did not immediately forgive. But eventually she came to me and let me know that she had gotten over it and all was forgotten.

Words, Sentences, Books can all weave intended or unintended magic on us as individuals and on those upon whom we inflict our words and, by extension, thoughts. Whatever we think or say has consequences so maybe Mother Teresa had it right let's focus on kind words so that their echoes can be positively endless.

Thanks for checking in. Hope you enjoyed a more serious topic. More to come soon.