“Phrases belong to one another,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the one surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Phrases are occasions, they do issues, change issues,” Ursula Ok. Le Guin wrote a technology after her. To care in regards to the etymologies of phrases is to care in regards to the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of phrases, to have a good time — as David Whyte did — “their lovely hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and deepen life itself. It’s of phrases that we construct the 2 nice pylons propping up our sense of actuality: ideas and tales. With out the idea of a desk, you’ll be staring blankly on the assemblage of incongruent surfaces and angles. With out arranging the information and occasions of your life right into a story — that narrative infrastructure of personhood — it will not be you searching of your eyes. To know your self is to inform a congruent story of who you might be, a narrative through which your idea of your self coheres even because it evolves. With out this central organizing precept of selfhood, life could be a steady id disaster.
Disaster, after all, is essential — it’s, as Alain de Botton writes in his deeply assuring meditation on the significance of breakdowns, “an insistent name to rebuild our lives on a extra genuine and honest foundation.” There come occasions when the tedium and turmoil of being your self turn into an excessive amount of to bear, exasperate you, exhaust you, make you want to be another person, ship you looking for a distinct organizing precept. (It takes some residing to achieve that time, which is why midlife might be such a time of tumult and transformation.)
We dwell and die with these questions, rooted in our earliest childhood, in these first reckonings with what makes us ourselves, these first experiments in self-acceptance. They’re deep and tough questions, however Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston convey nice playfulness and delight to them of their second collaboration, The Dictionary Story (public library) — a captivating fable in regards to the craving for inside congruence and the existential exhale of self-acceptance, and a love letter to language carried by Oliver’s joyful work, his singular hand-lettering, and Sam’s symphonic collage compositions.
The story begins on the bookshelf, the place “more often than not, all of the books knew what they had been about” — besides one ebook. As a result of she comprises “all of the phrases that had ever been learn, which meant she might say all of the issues that might ever be mentioned,” Dictionary is perpetually uncertain of herself, her organizing precept not coherence however alphabetic order, the phrases in her not a narrative however an inventory.
It’s usually essentially the most surprising and inconceivable issues that save us from ourselves: An Alligator all of the sudden leaps from the A pages and, ravenous for a snack, heads to the D pages for a Donut, who, not eager to be eaten, darts throughout the alphabet.
A chaos of enjoyment ensues as different phrases come alive as different characters — a Ghost, a Cloud, a Queen, a Twister, the Moon — every making an attempt to know their half within the complicated story writing itself by their animacy.
Dictionary’s thrill at lastly having a narrative unfold on her pages turns into terror as issues get out of hand. Out of the blue, her pure order begins to look a complete lot extra fascinating than this unbridled disarray of characters with incompatible needs. (And who hasn’t felt the discomposing overwhelm of making an attempt to make too many adjustments to the story of life abruptly, to harmonize the discord of conflicting needs, solely to finish up in even deeper incoherence.)
Ultimately, Dictionary calls on her pal Alphabet to revive her to herself — a stunning reminder that the best present a pal can provide is to sing again to you the track of your self once you overlook it.
Couple The Dictionary Story with Oliver and Sam’s earlier collaboration, A Baby of Books, then revisit The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — John Koenig’s uncommonly great invented phrases (based mostly on actual etymologies from world wide) for what we really feel however can not title, phrases like maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of abnormal issues”) and apolytus (“the second you notice you might be altering as an individual”).
