I read this preface back in 2005. It is from, The State of The Language (1980). It rocked my socks off. Enjoy. Language is the most vital instance of an undying human achievement: navigating between the rock Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. Scylla is the petrification of the obdurately measurable, of objectivity, and of the cult which is not science but scientism; the claim that everything which matters is a matter of fact. Charybdis is the flux of the personal, of subjectivity, of madness and solipsism; the claim that everything which matters is a matter of opinion. Hideous alternatives, the objective Scylla and the subjective Charybdis conspire to rule the waves. Yet a language resists this collusive imperialism, resists it by being the most extraordinary and the most ordinary defiance of the seductive false claims made on behalf of immovable facts and irresistible opinions. For the meaning of a word is not a matter of fact (which is why an argument about it can’t be settled by recourse to the dictionary), and it is not a matter of opinion (which is why an argument about it mustn’t be unsettled by a refusal to have recourse to the dictionary). The meaning of a word is a human agreement, created within society but incapable of having meaning except to and through individuals. We may find evidence for such agreements, but we can’t find proof of them. A language is a body of agreements. Some lapse; others change; new ones form. “Our language,” said the creative and critical genius who was American and then English -- T. S. Eliot -- “Our language, or any civilized language, is like the phoenix: it springs anew from its own ashes.” It is not only that a language has an astonishing power to renovation. For when a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past. We who are alive can touch each other through language only because we are touched by those who are no longer alive. Eliot was expressing his specific religious beliefs when he said that the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. But his words are not limited to his religious beliefs, for they depend upon the fact that the language of the living is tongued only because it communicates with the communication of the dead. A preface is always tempted to assure others and itself that “here is no random collection of, etc., etc.” But let it be said that the hope is that the diverse contributors to this book show themselves at one in this: their being alive to some of the countless ways the state of a language is one of living relationships, of its holding to a community with the pasts so that it may hold a community in the present and my hold open a community in the future. C. R. Cambridge, England June 1979
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 23:09:37 +0000
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