Defining big words

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The experience of Alaska’s coastal scenery, which was part of our recent vacation, falls very quickly into cliche, into big broad adjectives like spectacular and beautiful. These words seem good enough for short answers (“how was it?”) but don’t really communicate that much. Not to others, not to one’s own perception or memory either.

Some extra attentiveness, it seems to me, is required. For most of us, today, the default solution is to point and click the digital camera. A quick capture, that, of what’s worth capturing, with the possibility and intention of looking again and remembering. Perhaps that’s enough. Still, sometimes I sat watching with my journal open, trying to find specific words, trying to put some content into the repetitious inner “oh wow” of this mountainous, green, and blue terrain. What is the green of this particular green, the blue of this particular blue? How to describe the sound of glacial ice calving, an eagle in a tree, the sight of whales when evidence  as slight as a tail above water or a spume of spray can set a whole deck-row of folks exclaiming, clicking, and training binoculars as a kind of burrowing for more?

It’s harder work than one expects, this describing, this paying attention, when it’s — yes — simply spectacular and one wants to leave it at that, except that one knows only too well that the big disappears more quickly than the intentionally-apprehended, which is often smaller.

As for the culture of cruising, that’s hard to describe as well. When I used that expression to someone we met on ship, he asked, “What do you mean?” Good question. What did I mean? Vaguely Las Vegas says something but is also cliche, a big-word stereotype. Slow Vegas for a lot of people over 50 gets closer. Not good enough, though. What exactly? This too needs reflection, definition by detail and story. I feel like it needs analysis.  I’m a woman at the end of  my holiday, however, not a travel writer. Let’s just say it was a “great” (big word) time for now and I’m much too relaxed to work at it further at the moment! For my own future, I’ve got some photos and notes.

On vacation

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H. and I are currently in beautiful British Columbia — visiting our oldest son and his wife and their four children. We don’t see them nearly as often as we’d like — this time the absence had stretched from Christmas — but every visit is a wonderful experience and somehow we’ve managed to stay closely bonded. The children are at the age now where they make cards and welcome posters for us, so it’s all very heart-tugging and warming indeed!

Tomorrow H. and I set off on a cruise to Alaska, the inside passage. We’ve never done anything like this before, so we’re looking forward to experiencing ship life and to seeing the “sights.” Then it’s back for a few more days with the kids, before we return to Manitoba to pick up our regular routines of work and writing. The first week after our return contains Canada’s first Truth and Reconciliation Commission public events, to be held in Winnipeg. I’m hoping to take in as much of that as I can.

All this to say I may not post much for the next week or two, or even check in, unless I’m inspired with some thoughts post-Alaska. But the next weeks belong first to us and to our children and to the relaxation of vacation. Until later then….

Alone, but connected

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Most avid readers don’t need much by way of motivation for what they do. Still, In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics (University of Alberta Press, 2009), a thoughtful meditation on reading by Daniel Coleman, professor of English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., provides good reasons to keep reading.

Coleman considers what’s going on in the practice of reading, and posits it as both countercultural and spiritually beneficial.

He doesn’t present a romanticized view of reading, however. People can be damaged by it (even by the “Good Book”). And, he says, “readers can be insufferable.” But what’s both countercultural and spiritual about reading is its slowness, its emphasis on critical alertness, and its way of humility. “The desire to read emphasizes a basic generosity toward the Other that is the condition of all language.”

One of the strongest arguments Coleman makes is that reading, although private and solitary, actually brings us outward toward others.

…reading does a painful and positive thing at once. It creates the isolated individual who extracts herself from the group, but that isolation is not as alienated as it looks, for reading is also a connection to others, an imaginative connection to the writers and to other readers by means of the tracks the writer has left on the page.

Coleman discusses the “right posture” of reading (charity, as per Augustine), how we encounter the “absent Other” in reading, and reading’s “wide-ranging social and political effects.” The latter are especially emphasized by stories from Ethiopia and the context of slavery in which people gain literacy for the first time.

In summary of this aspect of reading, he says,

[R]eading is a process that simultaneously individualizes us by placing the words on the page between us and the world and connects us by drawing us out of ourselves through imaginative projection toward the thoughts and experiences of others. At one and the same time, reading is a technology of alienation and a maker of new community…. For reading can give us a role to play, a direction for our energies, a way to channel our spiritual hunger that takes us into the social and political worlds in which we live.

I believe he’s right.