The Three Most Important Things to Know

To speak, to read/write, to keep silent

Source: Flickr Commons

Back at the beginning of the year, a subscriber by the name of Anna asked that I answer the following three questions:

• What is the most important thing to know when you are young (baby-adolescent)?

• What is the most important thing you have learned in the middle (I won’t call this middle age)?

• What do you hope to know by the time you are, God-willing, an old man?

Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you, Anna!

Anna posed this question as a type of Sphinxlike riddle. If you’re not familiar with the tale, the riddle of the Sphinx involves the following question: What has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?

The answer is: Man (baby crawling, adult walking upright, elderly person using a cane).

In any case, here are my answers to Anna’s questions…

The Spoken Word: The Most Important Thing to Know as a Baby/Adolescent

The most important thing you can learn as a baby/adolescent is learning how to speak. Remember that the word “infant” comes from the French infans, which means, literally, “without speech.” It is a major achievement (arguably, the achievement) to go from “without speech” to “with speech.” By so doing, you more fully enter into the human community around you.

Unlike other animals, you begin your tiny little life by babbling. You let nonsense sounds waft into the air. And then, suddenly, one day you strike gold: Your words taken on meaning. Learning to speak only comes about as a result of other people talking to you. It implies, naturally, the capacity to listen. As a child, you’re surrounded by an atmosphere of the spoken word, and gradually it comes to permeate your consciousness.

I think it was Marshall McLuhan who said that the most important thing you’ll ever learn in your entire life is the English language. I suppose you could substitute native tongue here for English. Nevertheless, why is it so important? By learning a language, you step into the human community around you, and you begin to wield the medium through which you’ll learn everything else.

The Written Word: The Most Important Thing to Know in Middle Age

As you go through years and years of school, you’re steadily indoctrinated into the world of letters and books. People are constantly throwing books at you. Those spoken words you’d gotten so used to hearing get broken and chunked up into visible shapes called letters.

Note well that words in their primordial, auditory sense do not consist of letters. Neither are there any spaces between spoken words. Our sense of space between words or words as consisting of letters is entirely the result of our having been conditioned by literacy, as Walter Ong has demonstrated.

The letter “A” is a totally arbitrary shape that signifies the sound ah or ay. Once you master 26 of these arbitrary shapes called letters, you pretty much have all you need to translate the world of sound (the spoken word) into sight. If you want to play the game of culture in the West, it is obligatory to know these 26 letters and what they mean. You’ve got to learn the grammar of the culture (literally from gramma, meaning “letter”). It’s not like this in every culture, of course, but in the West, where I grew up, it most certainly was.

When I was a kid, I’d read R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books. They were these choose your own adventure stories where you were able to modulate the narrative by jumping to page X or Z when you hit page Y. In retrospect, it is clear that the Internet was beginning to change the form of books. We do this sort of jump to page X or Z whenever we click on a hyperlink of a web page.

I was tempted to say that the most important thing to know as an adult is to know how to type. Without Maevis Beacon’s old PC typing game, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I know that may sound like an exaggeration, but learning to type by home row keys instead of chicken pecking has saved me countless hours. Typing is the cursive of the digital age. I have hated (and still hate) touch screen QWERTY keyboards. They’re not the same. Give me back my tactile home row!

In any case, the most important thing to know in middle age is how to read and write. Perhaps this is obvious. Perhaps you disagree. But, as for me, reading gave me exposure to ideas that I may have never had access to in my immediate milieu. The first truly great books I ever read included Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, and many of C. S. Lewis’ staple texts (Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, etc.). With the exception of Percy, I’ve forgotten most of what these books contained, but I remember that their effect on me was momentous. Once I started waking up early to read, I basically haven’t stopped.

As for writing, as I’ve mentioned in my other post related to Walter Ong, this technology allows you to set the world at a distance, to view it more objectively. Writing lets you hang your thoughts in midair, freezing your thinking such that you can replay it and manipulate it. It is a truly extraordinary technology that we take for granted. Writing changes how we think. We think differently in this medium than in the spoken word. The grooves of our thought run deeper in the written word.

The most important thing you can learn in middle age is how to read and write. Lacking these skills, you skim the surface of life, I’m sad to say. This doesn’t mean that the illiterate are somehow lesser persons. It simply means that you miss the transcendence that comes along with using this particular technology.

St. Augustine said, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”

I suppose you could modulate his formula a bit and suggest, “A book is a world, and those who do not read travel only a mile.”

Silence: The Most Important Thing to Know by the Time You’re Old

St. Arsenius the Great said, “I have often regretted the things I have said, but I have never regretted my silence” (Laurus). As you age, you mature. And as you mature, you realize that your whole life is pressed up against the ineffable, the Beyond, God Himself.

If I had to guess, Pseudo Dionysius was an old man when he wrote his work on the Divine Names, wherein he catalogues how, ultimately, all words fail to express the true reality of the Divine.

With speech and writing comes the recognition that we can know the world around us. We can bottle the world and hand it to others. Language is a miraculous gift, both in its spoken and written forms. But as we grow and age, we may come to realize how our words cannot embrace the whole. All of our expressions are but partial glimpses and soundbites from the miraculous whole that we find ourselves within.

Silence requires humility. It is a rare person who can speak to another and listen to their words at the same time. My guess is that only God Himself can truly both speak and listen at the same time.

Silence, like stillness, is painful, especially for those rabid with loquaciousness. To sit still nowadays without bringing a digital device to your eyes seems impossible, indeed. Can you imagine the commuter without a glowing device in front of his face? One who is not chattering to the man next to him or babbling on his phone? A man who is content to sit still as he hovers over the tracks of his life?

Silence is the great mystery of communication. It comes in many shapes and forms, but ultimately it is the great analogy of God. What right do I have to say this? Through speech and writing, we are ever dealing with change. As Ong observes, our words come and go through time. And as Adler adds, time is the measure of change. But outside our speech, surrounding it, encapsulating it, swallowing it up…. You’ll find silence.

God supplies the great punctuation mark of history, both at the individual and collective level. What will that moment of death be like when our history comes to an end? An exclamation mark!? An ellipses….? Will you be cut off mid-sentence? Will we?

Whatever it will be like, you’ll be forced (or asked politely, or simply invited) to keep silent. In the novel Laurus, we learn that one definition for the dead is that they are those who do not speak. Before we pass, we may return to a state of infancy, a without-speechness.

Learning how to die is learning how to keep silent. This is what I’d like to learn in the evening of life.