THE WRITTEN WORD

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The spoken word races away as quickly as the next can be sent in pursuit, and so each word flees into oblivion. The sounds which we call ‘words’ are momentary, and passing things, for once articulated, they have their demise.

 

Not so with the written word. It lasts as long as the paper, or the stone on which it is inscribed. It has the availability to be called up as often as the reader desires. Black marks on white paper. But such strokes of the pen have preserved intact the memoirs of a thousand mighty men, the prose of a parcel of poets, and the leanings of limitless leaders. The men have passed away, but their words remain. And these words, thoughts and grand illusions live a second time, and a twenty-second time.

 

Lincoln’s “Four score and seven years ago” reverberates anew off well-worn headstones which were new and polished a hundred years hence. For though a century of deterioration now ‘decorates’ the stones, and the orator’s voice is muted, the word lives, and lives and lives again with each new issue of the printed page.

 

Common men, royalty, masons, parsons, prophets and slaves. Though gone a thousand years; they live. For their words remain; words of frustration, hope, warning and expectation.

 

Oh, the blessing of the written word. Not sparrows falling to the ground, as the spoken word. No, but the written word takes wings and soars into the future to lite afresh beneath a student’s eye.

With each written offering we pour a little of our mortal wine into a more permanent cup. Future generations will drink from this fountain.

 

And what of today? The written word provokes the unlearned, inspires the faint-hearted, strengthens the weak, and enables the ignorant. Best of all the written word is a traveler’s garden. A place to visit when a few stray minutes are strung together like pearls. A place to rest when the world has been unusually cruel. A place to relax at the end of an unseasonably rainy day.

 

Whether tis Eugene Field’s “Little Boy Blue,” Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” or Shakespeare’s “MacBeth,” our world is richer for the written word.

 

How many of our written words will live on, and what insight, admonition, or encouragement will they minister to those who drink from its fountain?

by William McDonald, PhD