Doing Violence to Language

Beautifully written, it speaks well into my place of need. The overall change in my feeling/mood when I hit mid-third paragraph is quite striking. Curious to see how others respond...

"The focus of our days is the dinner table, whether, as often happens in the winter nowadays, it is just Hugh and me or I am cooking for a dozen or more. When the children were in school I didn't care what time we ate dinner as long as we ate it together. If Hugh were going to be late, then we would all be late. If he had to be at the theatre early, we would eat early. This was the time the community (except for the very small babies) gathered together, when I saw most clearly illustrated the beautiful principle of unity in diversity: we were one, but we were certainly diverse, a living example of the fact that like and equal are not the same thing.

While Alan was teaching and finishing his master's degree, he ate a good many meals with us, for he often had to be in our neighborhood. Somehow it often happens at our table that we get into great and lovely battles (Alan and I seldom fight; when we do we are like two five-year-olds, and neither of us can bear it until we have made up). My usual battles with him are lovely because we are basically on the same side; they are nevertheless battles. Sometimes my husband acts as devil's advocate; he's very good at it. Sometimes the adversary is the darkness that roams the earth. During one dinner, Alan mentioned the men who feel that it is not God who is dead, as some theologians were then saying, but language that is dead. If language is to be revived or, like the phoenix, born of its own ashes, then violence must be done to it.

This seemed to me to be a distinct threat. If language is dead, so is my profession. How can one write books in a dead language? And what did he mean by "doing violence to language"? I began to argue heatedly, and in the midst of my own argument I began to see that doing violence to language means precisely the opposite of what I thought it meant. To do violence to language, in the sense in which he used the phrase, is not to use long words, or strange orders of words, or even to do anything unusual at all with the words in which we attempt to communicate. It means really spaking to each other, destroying platitudes and jargon and all the safe cushions of small talk with which we insulate ourselves; not being afraid to talk about the things that really matter. It means turning again to the words that affirm meaning, reason, unity, that teach responsible rather than selfish love. And sometimes, doing violence to language means not using it at all, not being afraid of being silent together, of being silent alone. Then, through the thunderous silence, we may be able to hear a still, small voice, and words will be born anew.

Tallis says that the greatest music ever written is the silence between the Crucifixus and the Resurrexus est in Bach's Mass in B minor. Yes; and I would add that some of the greatest writing mankind has ever produced comes in the caesura; the pause between words.

Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally minded Elizabethans used "um" and "er" the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: "You know." We interject "you know" meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence.

If I look to myself I find, as usual, contradiction. Ever since I've had a record player I've written to music-not all music, mostly Bach and Mozart and Scarlatti and people like that-but music: sound.

Yet when I went on my first retreat I slipped into silence as though into the cool waters of the sea. I felt totally, completely, easily at home in silence.

With the people I love most I can sit in silence indefinitely.

We need both for our full development; the joy of the sense of sound; and the equally great joy of its absence."

-Madeline L'Engle A Circle of Quiet, p. 132-134