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 during Hurricane Katrina.(1) 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 is not the only story of loss in the midst of natural disaster. Poems, novels, and memoirs were all lost in the same wind and water, devastating each of 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, the sting of lost words reaches far beyond the author. Any story lost is a loss of our own in some way. 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 belonging only to one person. John Milton writes eloquently of the wounds at stake in the death of a story:
“For books are not absolutely dead things but do contain a potency of life in them… [A]s 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… [A] good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”(2)
In the words of this author we cherish, the loss of a good book, the loss of language, is a loss of life in every multi-leveled sense of the word. “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 words and characters, verse and meter is well worth the risk.
I was in the fourth grade when I first experienced this kind of hold of a story on my young life. 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 itself—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.”(3) His subsequent wrestling with death was an initiation of sorts into my own.
Through others we have no doubt learned similarly. We are incarnate inhabitants of our world, and we learn and know this world by stories.(4) The shock of recognition in a character that speaks what we feel—what we feel but do not yet know—initiates and wakes us to life and story around us—indeed, as Milton says, to a master spirit, to life beyond life. God made humans, said Elie Wiesel, because God loves stories.(5) Indeed, my own skewed perspective of God was in part rewritten by God’s use of my own imagination. I learned to know God through themes of forgiveness in Dostoevsky, reason in Chesterton, loyalty in Tolkien, mystery and wonder in the fairy story. God is indeed always leading us toward the rooms of belonging Christ helps us to imagine.
Like the angel of the LORD who appeared to the weary Elijah, God offers us word and story as substance for the very journey: “Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you” (1 Kings 19:7). In the midst of this great journey of characters, 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.
(1) Daniel Golden, ” Words Can’t Describe What Some Writers In New Orleans Lost,” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 1, 2005.
(2) John Milton, Areopagitica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), 3.
(3) Katherine Patterson, Bridge to Terabithia (New York: Harper, 1977), 134.
(4) For a helpful exploration of this topic, see philosopher James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013).
(5) Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1995), prologue.
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