Oct 31 2008
Words words words!
You can probably tell, from my various posts about language books, that I’m into words in a seriously major way. I read them, I write them, I’m fascinated by them. As I read, they sink into my brain, and as I write, I look for the best ones, to express what I want to say.
The two things are like a big feedback loop: as I read the marvelous ways that people express things, I learn new ways to say things myself. Sometimes I run into books that force me to flee to a dictionary, because there are words there that I’ve never seen before, and I love it! Whether or not I love the story in other ways, I love it for making me expand my vocabulary.
The two writers who spring to mind when I think of that phenomenon are Mervyn Peake and Stephen R. Donaldson. Peake wrote the Gormenghast books, while Donaldson has written, among other things, the eight (so far) Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.
Peake didn’t make me run to the dictionary quite as much as Donaldson (though there were times…), but the way he used language enthralled me. Take this paragraph, for example:
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
Still gives me goosebumps now. And even in that paragraph I’d have had to look up the word “circumfusion.” (Which means, by the way, pouring or diffusing around, or spreading.)
In Donaldson’s books, I sought the dictionary at various times to look up words like orison (a prayer; related to “oration” and “oratorio”), inchoate (imperfectly formed or developed), and chiaroscuro (the arrangement of light and dark parts in a work of art).
I can forgive a lot of other flaws in a piece of writing if it intrigues me enough to make me run to the dictionary and learn new words. I’ve been a reader for long enough, now, that it doesn’t happen very much any more. In fact, it’s so rare that the last time it happened in a big way was in fact with Peake and Donaldson, when I was in my late twenties. I’ve gotten only the occasional flicker since then.
This is why I reread their books once in a while, all these years later. To remind me of the wonder of words.
