Some truisms are really true: like, “A picture is a worth a thousand words.” Any of your favorite paintings will do as an example: Van Gogh’;s “Starry Night”? Hopper’s “Nighthawks”? I appreciate all the pictorial arts, from traditional oils and watercolors to collage collections of anything at hand, and not just by old masters. But my métier is words, so from where I sit, a sentence worth of words can sometimes put the picture to shame. Words deftly arranged are the collage of the mind, and I worry that our infatuation with communicating by imagery alone is shrinking the spaciousness of our minds.
For millennia now, we human beings have transformed the gift of wordmaking into the art of worLdmaking, the difference between the two being the added “L” for the capacity of a Literate imagination: “Limagination,” as I will call it. And Limagination is increasingly on life support.
I am told that Boomers still phone, Gen X emails, Millennials txt, and Gen Z posts photos. What this adage overlooks is the Boomers’ parents, the Great Generation, as they are called, who wrote letters. It seems comical now that I had to take penmanship in school, but with some divinely given foresight, perhaps, I did poorly enough at it that I adopted email practically the minute it came out. Still, I shuddr at thos quickjly readble but poorly spelld and ungrammaticl halfsentences by whch we pass on email info. I deliberately and conscientiously write email letters to exercise my writing muscle, attached as it is to my conceptual competence.
To be sure, sometimes only an image will do: appreciating the trauma of warfare, for example, as in the D Day amphibious landing on the beaches of Nazi-occupied France. It took a 1962 film (The Longest Day) to give a later generation some grasp of the agony in which allied soldiers died in droves from Nazi gunneries high above the beach; the follow-up 1998 parallel (Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan) was so horrifically realistic that moviegoers closed their eyes and cringed in their seats, rather than experience vicariously the horrific massacre being portrayed on screen. Recall, alternatively, the raw footage of concentration camps taken by their liberators, who couldn’t believe their eyes and knew you had to see it to believe it.
Positive examples abound as well: your old wedding photo; a smiling university graduate. But tellingly, even photography, the most realistic imagery of all, is likely to elicit explanatory words of what we are seeing or how we should react to it. I don’t just show you a picture from my wallet: I say, “Look! That’s my granddaughter! If only her grandmother could have lived to see how happy she is.”
The act of seeing is regularly guided by words. Art museums provide interprative audio guides to tell us what to “see” in famous paintings. Think also of cartoons, like a Far Side picture of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes; we don’t get the joke without the caption: “The real reason dinosaurs became extinct.”[i] Yehudah Amichai gets it right when he describes tourists in Jerusalem (but it could have been someone looking at a photograph of what the tourists saw). “Redemption will come,” says Amichai,
… only if their guide tells them,
“You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”[ii]
Without the guide, they would have missed the whole point of “seeing.”
Then too, some things cannot be pictured. No image can capture the tortured soul of whom Alfred Lord Tennyson says, “The passions of her mind… made war upon each other … till pity won”;[iii] or the pathos of Charles Dickens’s “perennial hopeless court” which is “locked up,” and which evokes this wishful verdict on itself: “If all the injustice it has committed and all the misery it has caused could only be locked up with it!”[iv] In just eight words, Annie Dillard serves up a tantalizing line that could easily become an entire course on human curiosity: “Knowledge and understanding meet where science meets theology.”[v] Talk about Limagination!
We desperately need to reclaim the art of writing.
Let me be clear, however: I don’t, for a moment, suggest we should all aspire to be monumentally great authors. William Faulkner received a Nobel prize because he was one, butthe New York Times described him as having “one of the most complex, unreadable and uncommunicative prose styles ever to find its way into print.” That should hardly be our goal. Faulkner, a genuine writing genius, was writing for a literary elite, while we are just writing letters home. But Faulkner had the right idea, even for us mere scribbly mortals. “The writer’s duty,” he said, “is to write about the human heart in conflict with itself.” More recently, writer/reviewer Claudia Roth Pierpont called that conflict, “the tug and traction of words as they move thoughts into place in the mind.”[vi]
I am not a hopeless romantic. I concede the judgement that for most people, the old world of informed cross-reference to classics like the Homeric heroes of Greek mythology, and even the Bible itself, is what Judaism calls a goses, the state of being practically dead. What I do not concede is the inevitable end of the human capacity to use language creatively.
So, dear Students, here’s your homework assignment: the next time you go to the gym, attend a meeting, listen to some music, or just meditate on life while cooking dinner, take time afterward to write a paragraph or two about how you felt, what thoughts you conjured up, what far-out notion you might like to entertain. Send it to someone you love. Ask for a short letter in return. Protect the endangered species called Limagination.
[i] https://www.facebook.com/groups/thefarsides/posts/23977368131860340/
[ii] https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/119204.3?lang=bi
[iii] Alfred Lord Tennyson, Godiva.
[iv] Charles Dickens, Bleak House (end Chapter 1)
[v] Annie Dillard, Living By Fiction (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 163.
[vi] Claudia Roth Pierpont, “A Study in Scarlett: How Gone with the Wind Shaped American Myths About Slavery and Southern Women,” New York Review, August 24, 1992. The Faulkner quotation is from her as well.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 