{"id":10018,"date":"2025-02-08T14:32:14","date_gmt":"2025-02-08T18:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/an-illustrated-love-letter-to-words-and-the-meaning-between-them-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-02-08T14:32:14","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T18:32:14","slug":"an-illustrated-love-letter-to-words-and-the-meaning-between-them-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/an-illustrated-love-letter-to-words-and-the-meaning-between-them-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"An Illustrated Love Letter to Words and the Meaning Between Them \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean one thing only, with no room for interpretation \u2014 a little unit of truth, unhaunted by the chimera of meaning. I felt like I was speaking the language of the universe itself, precise and impartial, safe from the subjectivities that I already knew made human beings gravely misunderstand and then mistreat one another. <\/p>\n

And yet, in steps too unconscious and incremental even for me to perceive, I became a writer and not a mathematician. Words, in the end, are where we live and how we build the world inside the universe. \u201cWords are events, they do things, change things,\u201d Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in one of the finest things I have ever read<\/a>. Words are all we have to translate one consciousness to another<\/a>. They are how we render ourselves real to each other \u2014 we need them to convey what the touch of life feels like on the skin of the particular psyche and the particular nervous system we have each drawn from the cosmic lottery: You will never know what blue looks like to me and I what a fever feels like to you. They are how we render reality for ourselves \u2014 it is in words that we narrate the events of our lives inside the lonely bone cave of the mind in order to make sense of what is happening and inscribe it into the ledger of memory, on the pages of which the story of the self emerges. <\/p>\n

This fundamental subjectivity of experience makes every word we write and utter a bottle of pressurized ambiguity effervescent with myriad meanings, tossed into the ocean of experience in the touching hope that it will convey a clear message about what we see and what we feel. The great miracle is that we understand each other at all.<\/p>\n

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Artist Julie Paschkis (who illustrated those wonderful picture-book biographies of Pablo Neruda<\/a> and Maria Merian<\/a>) conjures up the magic of words and their blessed bewilderment of meaning in The Wordy Book<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), each page of which opens up a question \u2014 simple yet profound, quietly poetic \u2014 and leaves you to wander into your own answer inside a painting alive with words. <\/p>\n

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There is an Alice in Wonderland<\/em> quality to the book: The questions play with the limits of logic (What tells me more, an IF or an OR?<\/em>) and with the existential restlessness of childhood (When does there become here? When does then become now?<\/em>); they invite the fundamental curiosity at the heart of compassion (Do you see what I see?<\/em>) and emanate a radiant love of life (What is the sum of a summer day?<\/em>) consonant with the vitality of Paschkis\u2019s paintings \u2014 this parallel language of shape and color just as rich and eloquent as the language of words, as playful and abstract as the language of mathematics. <\/p>\n

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Complement The Wordy Book<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with The Lost Words<\/em><\/a> \u2014 writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris\u2019s courageous rewilding of children\u2019s imagination through nature words discarded from the modern dictionary as irrelevant \u2014 and The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows<\/em><\/a> \u2014 John Koenig\u2019s splendid invented words for real things we feel but cannot name \u2014 then revisit the only surviving recording<\/a> of Virginia Woolf\u2019s voice, narrating her lyrical love letter to the art of words, and Mary Shelley on their world-revising power<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}