Published in the Idaho Statesman, December 19, 2001
As I write this, searchers still comb the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York looking for answers. Questions are much easier to find these days; they came raining down along with fluttering sheets of paper that filled the air as the buildings collapsed. This is the image that haunts me--the flurry of white paper that was once letters, scribbled notes, application forms, birthday cards, and perhaps a journal page--words sent aloft only to settle anonymously on the debris-covered New York sidewalks below.
In such a world, can writing matter? When carefully chosen words are taken violently from their owners and sent aimlessly swirling in the wind drafts of collapsing buildings, doesn't it seem that language is suddenly as insignificant as those shredded bits of paper? What can we say to each other that has enough meaning? What do we say to those who hate inspires such violence? What words do we choose to capture what we feel?
Yet for most of us, especially now, there is a hunger to speak, to write, to communicate. It is one way that we long to learn that we are not alone. It is one way we can struggle to understand what seems incomprehensible. While our words often seem to fail us, we still invest them with hope.
Such things are on my mind as I consider my work as a writing teacher. For the first time in 20 years, I wasn't standing before a class this September, but in the days that followed September 11th I imagined that I was, looking back at the stunned faces of 25 students who came to hear how to write a good lead, or discuss the use of detail in an essay, or ask questions about sentence fragments. I imagined that they, too, held the image of impossibly white pages falling, falling against mushrooming clouds of gray dust. What would I have said to these developing writers?
Perhaps I would have told them that is it the writer's job to make sense of things. In the face of the incomprehensible, language can seem insubstantial. But if writers are willing, they can pursue words, chase them like loose pieces of paper blown helter-skelter in the wind. If writers do this, let language lead in pursuit of meaning, they will find themselves on streets they don't recognize, among strangers and friends, stumbling on things they didn't know they knew.
But this requires faith that words are still worth following, as I have followed them here, trying to discover what it might mean that before the World Trade Center towers collapsed, paper fell like snow.
4 comments:
I think writing does matter, whether some of us would like to think it does or not. Most significant--and not so significant--events in history are written down and recorded so those who weren't there to actually remember it themselves actually can. Descriptive writing and imagery also help to paint a picture to invoke thinking on a level we wouldn't otherwise think without it. I think that's really important to understand whatever story the author is trying to tell.
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