Words and Journeys

Kris Lackey thought he had hurricane-proofed his manuscripts. An English professor at the University of New Orleans, he had saved his fiction and papers—including the novel he had half-finished—via hard drive, flash drive, diskette, and hard copy. But as the murky waters continued to rise and he was forced to evacuate his home, he left his papers and computer equipment behind. Even so, he left them in high places—tables and bookshelves well out of harm’s way. He was, by no means, expecting the 11 feet of water that completely besieged his house. Returning more than a month later, Lackey found pages floating in mud, completely indecipherable, as well as what was left of his flash and hard drives. Nothing was retrievable. Nothing.

The frustration of lost words is a silence palpable to many. When long emails go missing or documents are destroyed in a crash of technology, the task of reconstruction is deeply aggravating at best—at times, it is painful. Sadly, Mr. Lackey's loss of story and word in New Orleans is not the only report like it. Poems, novels, and memoirs were lost in the same wind and water, all devastating their authors. To lose a book, to lose an entire lifetime of words, is a sting I shudder to imagine.
Yet, in a very real sense, any story lost is a loss of our own. The sting of loss reaches far beyond the author. Losing words is painful because our words are not haphazard. Losing books is devastating because books play an irreplaceable role in the life of the reader. The stories that reach us are so much more than words on a page. John Milton writes of the wounds at stake in the death of a story:

"For books are not absolutely dead things...[but] do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.... As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye."

In the words of this author we cherish, the loss of a good book, the loss of language, is a loss of life. "There is a reason," I heard someone say recently, "that books have been smuggled over borders for centuries." The wealth of life and knowledge in the words and characters that speak to us is well worth the risk.

I was in the fourth grade when I first experienced this kind of hold of a story on my soul. I was reading Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terebithia, which both carefully and abruptly introduced me to my own mortality. I was a year younger than the characters that came bounding out of those pages and into my world. But the thought of death as an unyielding part of life—one that would reach even me—was a thought that had not yet entered my mind. With Jess, I insisted there was some mistake: "Leslie could not die anymore than he himself could die." His subsequent wrestling with death was an initiation of sorts into the realization of my own.

Through others we have learned similarly. The shock of recognition in a character that speaks what we feel—what we feel but do not know—initiates and wakes us to life and story around us. "God made man," said Elie Wiesel "because He loves stories." And so my skewed perspective of God as Father was in part rewritten by his use of my own imagination. I learned to love God through the golden mane of an untamed Aslan. I learn to know God through themes of forgiveness in Dostoevsky, reason in Chesterton, loyalty in Tolkien, and wonder in the fairy story. God is always leading us toward the rooms Christ left us to imagine.

Like the angel of the LORD who appeared to the weary Elijah, God offers us words as strength for the journey: "Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you" (1 Kings 19:7). It strikes me in the midst of this great journey of characters that this quality of God, this character who speaks, this Word who became flesh on our behalf, is indeed an extraordinary gift. Without words that startle us awake or stories that inexplicably remain with us, we would grow faint in the silence, longing for a voice to cry out in our wilderness. How remarkable that this is exactly the kind of God who speaks.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.