Words and Understanding

Words and Understanding

To peruse the pages of forgotten books is a pastime in which I shall always partake; and though it turns out that I actually read very few sentences, the mere fixture of the words, or the subject, create an affinity in the mind apt to deeper contemplation.  

Hardly can such a book be opened before there exists a mystic relationship with what is old, and even more so to the obscure. Far from leading us into a clear path of understanding, that same awkward and unsettling sentiment transfixes us and our thoughts drift back and forth upon the page until it is no longer the story to which we are attached, but the power of our imagination.  It is only when we feel we need to know something that words become our greatest let down; they are but a means to the mysterious--for even among the driest of archaeological accounts there remains something so illuminating, not in what is being recounted, but what is being subsumed. 

Perhaps we are all looking for a past, a future, but in the mere play of our imagination we get tangled up in words and ideas and brazenly call upon the world to believe them. To set down words until the end of time, to read them as if they were etched upon stone, and not merely upon the flimsy invisible page of the mind, is to believe that there is no truth present in the world, because what we can capture and hold on to, is simply the truest sign of its degeneration. 

I think the surest thing reading has taught me is not to know, but to encourage a first step, not to read, but to understand the relationship we have with silence. What are words in any case than visible fluctuations in light. Thoughts indeed are the same internal movement. Looking out the window or walking in the countryside is reading as well, but we are taught to be imperfect, to always need something to help us along. Reading is perhaps a symbolic gesture that we have completely forgotten the meaning of, completely lost to time through this jumble of words and ideas, something that once told us: look into the matter and wait.

Douglas Thornton