Words&Dirt

“Although I too enjoyed reading, I never loved the sport of language the way Owen did. This was because to me, language had no native intelligence of its own––it was created by man and was given meaning by man, and therefore clever writing often seemed to me little more than a Chinese puzzle box of contrivances. Writers are praised for having a facility with something man-made, something that can be changed or manipulated at will; but why is augmenting a man-made construction considered an act of brilliance? But perhaps I am not making sense here, so let me put it another way: language has no inherent secrets.

But science, specifically the science of disease, was all delicious secrets, dark oily pockets of mystery. Language could be misinterpreted, misconstrued, its rules imposed or ignored at whim. There was no discipline to it. It seemed sometimes a sort of game made up by man to amuse himself with, much as Owen did. But a disease, a virus, a wriggling string of bacteria, existed with our without man, and it was up to us to fathom its secrets.”

––The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara, pg. 34

“Honor is no decaying vestige of a premodern order; it is, for us, what it has always been, an engine, fueled by the dialogue between our self-conceptions and the regard for others, that can drive us to take seriously our responsibilities in a world we share. A person with integrity will care that she lives up to her ideals. If she succeeds, we may owe her our respect. But caring to do right is not the same thing as caring to be worthy of respect; it is the concern for respect that connects living well with our place in a social world. Honor takes integrity public.”

––The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, pg. 179