My World
*msn: melancholiaismyfriend
I taught you words as pictures, my mother tells me, happily, mystifyingly.
I used flashcards, you know? Cards got words, but no pictures! Not like the other parents!
No, not like the other parents.
I remember those flashcards; plain black handwritten letters on faded white cardboard she got cheap because it was old. No, I had no pretty coloured pictures, where cars were round-roofed and red, and cats were fat with beaming smiles and squiggly whiskers that almost twirled as you watched.
No, not at all – to me a cat was a cat not a doodled orange blob and it looked like this:
CAT.
And that was that and nothing would ever be the same again. Scrawling letters and walls of print were my first and greatest loves. I was my mother’s daughter – no pictures for MY books, I said – I resented the space they took up that words and more words could have filled, words that painted far prettier pictures in my head than any other could.
This is, perhaps, why I’d rather read TV transcripts than watch the shows. Why I’m content to read of far-off lands and stay placidly at home. Why my favourite songs are still the ones with words that I can sing to. (How uncultured! Shudder, you.)
There are even people I have loved (and some that I still do) for their conversation alone, regardless of how they looked or acted.
[It’s only words, but words are all you need to take my heart away.]
And so I live in a world of words, and if each picture is worth a thousand, and every word a picture to me, then I am rapt, wrapped in a swirling sea of thousands upon thousands of tumbling letters, strung into the best of sentence-songs.
This, then, is the root of the great sorrow I feel at being a unilinguist. That I am blind to the million worlds that dance their way through a literary universe.
I grieve, I really do, that I will never see the pictures these foreign wordsmiths paint. I will never hear the music in the singing of their words. Translations are but mocking rippled window panes, and the beauty is forever lost.
This, this is why I read all I can (and more) – to make the most of all within my reach, and to help me forget the stars I’ll never see.
[all suggestions for much-needed fixes welcome.]
I taught you words as pictures, my mother tells me, happily, mystifyingly.
I used flashcards, you know? Cards got words, but no pictures! Not like the other parents!
No, not like the other parents.
I remember those flashcards; plain black handwritten letters on faded white cardboard she got cheap because it was old. No, I had no pretty coloured pictures, where cars were round-roofed and red, and cats were fat with beaming smiles and squiggly whiskers that almost twirled as you watched.
No, not at all – to me a cat was a cat not a doodled orange blob and it looked like this:
CAT.
And that was that and nothing would ever be the same again. Scrawling letters and walls of print were my first and greatest loves. I was my mother’s daughter – no pictures for MY books, I said – I resented the space they took up that words and more words could have filled, words that painted far prettier pictures in my head than any other could.
This is, perhaps, why I’d rather read TV transcripts than watch the shows. Why I’m content to read of far-off lands and stay placidly at home. Why my favourite songs are still the ones with words that I can sing to. (How uncultured! Shudder, you.)
There are even people I have loved (and some that I still do) for their conversation alone, regardless of how they looked or acted.
[It’s only words, but words are all you need to take my heart away.]
And so I live in a world of words, and if each picture is worth a thousand, and every word a picture to me, then I am rapt, wrapped in a swirling sea of thousands upon thousands of tumbling letters, strung into the best of sentence-songs.
This, then, is the root of the great sorrow I feel at being a unilinguist. That I am blind to the million worlds that dance their way through a literary universe.
I grieve, I really do, that I will never see the pictures these foreign wordsmiths paint. I will never hear the music in the singing of their words. Translations are but mocking rippled window panes, and the beauty is forever lost.
This, this is why I read all I can (and more) – to make the most of all within my reach, and to help me forget the stars I’ll never see.
[all suggestions for much-needed fixes welcome.]
posted by me me me at
11:27 PM
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