[The Bookshelf 059] A Portal to Meaning-Making
How a better vocabulary helps us live better lives
Before we get to the books, I want to tell you a story.
You’re going to have to trust me, but it’s related to the books we’re going to consider and, more importantly, it’s absolutely related to our lives—both yours and mine. So, I’m asking you to go with me here.
Cool? Cool.
On a Wednesday afternoon in December, I paid a visit to my optometrist for a routine eye exam. It’s the same office I’ve been going to for years. By now I know the drill. The optometric assistant scanned my eyeballs with what seemed to be a sequence of expensive lasers. She asked me to stare straight ahead at the light, to cast my eyes upon the red barn in the viewfinder. She took close-up pictures that rendered my retinas as brilliant galaxies.
So far so good.
But then came a test I don’t remember seeing before. It had a downward-facing arrow on one side and numbered music notes on the other. It looked something like this.
She asked me to tell her which number the arrow was pointing at. The way she asked that question—the way she’d asked all the questions, the same questions she must ask people like me dozens of times a day—implied that it would be an easy question to answer.
It wasn’t. I told her I could see the arrow with my left eye and I could see the music notes with my right, but I couldn’t bring myself to see them both at the same time. Initially, she thought I misunderstood the assignment, so she repeated it. And again I told her I couldn’t see it. She first froze, then did some fidgeting, then quickly showed me into the final consultation room. She closed the door on her way out. My giant, terrifying retinas stared at me from the monitor.
A few minutes later, the optometrist came in. A kind, joyful man, always and everywhere. He reviewed my test results and eye scans. He had me read tiny letters on the wall, telling him whether lens A or lens B was more clear. He was very reassuring. He said “good job” a lot.
Then he told me everything looked great, that he’d see me next time, and to say hello to Katie.
Wait a minute, I thought. What about the music notes and the arrow, that eye test I’d totally and utterly failed? He hadn’t so much as mentioned it. So, after a hesitant pause, I asked him.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “You aren’t gonna be able to do that one.”
I looked at him. He went on to explain that my eyes don’t work together, in stereo, the way most people’s eyes do. While my left eye and my right eye do their respective jobs, approximately speaking, they don’t cooperate with each other the way eyes are supposed to. So in effect, to keep life manageable my brain suppresses the data my weaker eye uploads. Meanwhile I make my way through the world relying on what the stronger eye sees. He said it’s called exotropia.
This is not a recent development; I was born with it. I’ve always known that my left eye is stronger than my right. I’ve been aware of seeing double from time to time, especially when I’m tired. But being all I’ve ever known, I have never had reason to consider this unusual. Call me crazy, but, c’mon: I read books and watch movies, I drive my car without regularly crashing, I make coffee and take out the trash and play softball. All the normal stuff people use their eyes to do.
It’s a testament, I suppose, to the marvelous human resiliency God has baked into his creation that a person like me can go 39 years with an eye condition like this and never realize it, much less have it named.
Recognizing now that depth perception is an area at which I’m at a distinct disadvantage, I’m suddenly proud of what a skilled parallel parker I’ve been over the years. And finally I have a satisfying explanation as to why I never fulfilled my junior high ambitions of becoming a pro ballplayer never quite panned out.
So it’s good to know about exotropia. It’s good to have things named.
What I’ve Read Recently
In my review of George Saunders’ essay collection The Braindead Megaphone, I noted the “humane curiosity” that characterizes his writing: “He is genuinely interested in the world we share, and the people we share it with, and wants us to share that interest. I find his writing persuasive in this regard, and infectious.”
Saunders isn’t known first for his essays, of course, but for his short stories. He’s a contemporary master of the form, possibly the best in the biz. And while the art of fiction is different from that of an essay (persuasion happens differently, for one thing), I’ve always appreciated the way that same humane curiosity permeates his short stories as well.
And now he’s showing us how his writing habits—and large parts of his imagination—have taken form. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (Random House) is based on a course Saunders has been teaching his students at Syracuse for decades. He selects a handful of his favorite short stories written by Russians in the nineteenth century and dissects them, page by page. But don’t worry, these dissections don’t have the feel of lab experiments. Cold and sterile this book is not.
When Gogol has a barber discover a detached human nose in a loaf of bread, or Tolstoy pulls us along on a miserable, misbegotten carriage ride in a blizzard, Saunders has the audacity to posit some clues as to what the authors might be up to in telling us all this.
By studying and teaching their work over the years, Saunders came to the realization that these Russians “seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.”
Fiction isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, escape. Good fiction does work on us. Stories can soften hearts and stimulate minds. (That’s why some people are afraid of them.)
But none of this happens by accident. So when we “get lost” in a story or are moved to tears by a character’s situation or find that we remember a phrase or a sentence years later, that’s a story doing what it was designed to do. And in these essays, Saunders names a few of the ways these great writers manage to do it.
This is a book that demands concentration. One of the stories reprinted here is 50 pages long, presumably intended to be read in one sitting, ideally followed in short order by Saunders’ own exploration of the story’s structure and themes.
But the dedicated reader will be rewarded. Saunders brings these dead Russians to life in a way that leaves me marveling at their craft, honed as it was over long, hard years. I’ll never be a Gogol or a Tolstoy or a Chekhov, and I don’t need to be. But maybe, just maybe, I can learn something from them—and from our winsome teacher who reminds us, seriously (for the most part), that “we’re reading to see what we can steal.”
What I’m Reading Now
There’s a lot happening beneath the surface of a good story. Likewise, there’s a lot that goes on beneath the surface of our lives.
If someone (me) can go half a lifetime without naming the eye condition that literally changes how they (I) see the world, just imagine all the other parts of ourselves—mysterious but no less consequential—that are never acknowledged, let alone named.
Like emotions.
Fifteen years ago, the researcher Brené Brown and her team began asking people to list “all of the emotions that they could recognize and name as they were experiencing them.” Seven thousand surveys later, the average number of emotions respondents managed to name was three: happy, sad, and angry.
In her new book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (Random House), Brown has set out to expand our emotional vocabulary. After her engaging and personal introduction, it took me by surprise that subsequent chapters have more of a dictionary feel. This is a well-designed book with evocative photos and full-page quotes, as well as numerous first-person anecdotes and research findings. But mainly we get a lot of definitions of emotions and emotion-adjacent words.
Which isn’t entirely a bad thing. I mean, do most of us honestly understand the difference between wonder and awe? Between irony and sarcasm? Or what about hubris? How is that different from pride?
As much as I love words and get joy from using them (or seeing them used) well, some words are easier to find than others. That’s why I’m grateful for this book and for Brené Brown’s mission to give us a more robust vocabulary, especially pertaining to matters of the heart.
What I Might Read Next
For years, I’ve intended to read A Garland for Ashes (Quellen) by Hanna Zack Miley. Somehow, inexplicably, it hasn’t happened yet. But mark my words: that’s about to change.
Hanna is a friend of ours, a fellow parishioner who we greatly respect. She’s also a Holocaust survivor who for decades has been doing reconciliation and truthtelling work back in Germany and, without a doubt, in her own heart. Recently, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hanna shared this moving video, telling a bit of her story. I’m eager to read more in her memoir very soon.
As always, thanks for reading.
Tim
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“Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. When we don’t have the language to talk about what we’re experiencing, our ability to make sense of what’s happening and share it with others is severely limited . . . Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.”
– Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart