Chrisonomicon

Monday, December 30, 2002

For those of you who scour Arts & Letters Daily as frequently as I have the past few weeks, I'd like to apologize up front for the recent deluge of A&L-related links (Hi, my name is Chris. I'm an A&L-coholic.) Philip Pullman discusses writers' responsibilities to their stories, outlining several commitments we should make to ourselves once we volunteer to this service of storytelling -- a service that may not change the world, but that might bring "the sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not."

My favorite is Pullman's responsibility to the medium:

... those of us who use [language] professionally are responsible for looking after it... That means, for example, making sure of the meaning of words by looking them up in a good dictionary. And not only that: words have a history, a flavour of their origin, as well as a contemporary meaning. We should acquire as many dictionaries as we have space for, out-of-date ones as well as new ones, and make a habit of using them.

When I was in elementary school, I won several spelling bees, thanks in part to my parents' insistence that I always look up questionable words in the dictionary. The dictionary and I became good friends. It was orderly, patient, and a place I could find invariability in difficult times of change. As the years passed, however, those well-worn pages started to reveal their faliability as language mutated and evolved, proof that the medium -- language, grammar, spelling -- is anything but concrete. Rules we've been taught since grade school are merely guidelines, wishes passed down from previous generations like a photo album or heirloom, hopes that we would preserve this for posterity.

(While there is often a technical requirement for standardization in newer media, this desire for preservation is also observable in web standards efforts over the years.)

This responsibility to the medium also ensures that our writing is not only widely accessible, but that older works and those yet to be written will be as well. In his review, Pullman may not have resolved whether literature can better society. By writing responsibly, however, society maintains a thread of consciousness that can be traced throughout the ages, and this alone may be worth the effort, for progress can't be achieved without a starting point or method of tracking advancements. Writing serves this end nicely.