Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Knowledge is Flower
I’ve been writing a lot lately but none of it is ready to post. However, as I hear Zach start to stir from his nap, I will take this opportunity to share a few words about a few words.
Knowledge being immutable, the dictionary and encyclopedia always had an esteemed place on our shelves when I was growing up. The old Britannica stayed in dad’s study for his professional use, and we got the World Book up in the TV room – and just below the World Book lay the unabridged Random House Dictionary. We had an unabridged OED, too, the two-volume set with the magnifying glass, but the RHD was the one we really enjoyed using, with its concise definitions, nice friendly typeface, and all sorts of fun extra stuff in the back about the solar system and the development of the alphabet and so forth. It also, naturally, contained all the words, every one of them – including those that were obscure or obscene. It was my first favorite dictionary. From it I developed my belief that a good dictionary would answer any question, for time immemorial.
But the RHD stayed behind when I went off to college and I had to make do with my old Little OED from grade school – a serviceable reader’s dictionary but significantly abridged, and lacking any of the entertaining extras to which I’d grown accustomed. What I needed was one of those huge, shelf-eating dictionaries, with dark cloth binding and thousands of speckled page-ends.
Within two years, my wish was granted, though not as I would have had it: My grandfather Herman passed away and didn’t need his dictionary anymore. It said OED on the spine in gold letters and it weighed a billion pounds. It was perfect for lending gravitas to my quirky sophomore party den, and it seemed to contain all the arcane sesquipedalia up which I had occasional need to look. What’s more, pressed within it was the carnation my dad wore to grandpa’s funeral. So it was huge and comprehensive, and just as it represented a path to ancient wisdom, it also represented my own hereditary path as well. Etymology and genealogy, all in one enormous comprehensive package.
This giant OED served me well enough through college. While in law school, though, I stumbled onto a great deal for a good cheap dictionary, one like the old RHD from my childhood, with cut-out letternotches and color sections on space exploration and U.S. presidents; yet it was lightweight, even while it contained more pages than grandpa’s old OED. I got the new dictionary and the old one was relegated to reserve status. Eventually it disappeared from sight into a box of second-tier books, and that’s where it was when I found it again not too long ago.
I pulled it out and thumbed through its musty pages. The paper seemed fragile and stiff; the typeface, outmoded and old-fashioned. I checked the copyright date: 1947. Herman would have bought it at the apex of a successful career. I turned to the “c”s and looked up “computer.” The terse definition was “a person or thing that computes.” This struck me as unduly circumspect, even to the point of inaccuracy. I looked up “transistor,” but it wasn’t there. Neither was “gluon” or “Velcro.” Despite having all the redolent articulations of Milton and Yeats, no matter how archaic, it didn’t have any words invented after the end of World War II. Its history was too historical, too limited. It just didn’t do anymore.
It soon came to pass that many boxes of once-treasured material possessions had to be jettisoned from our apartment to make room for Zachary. One of those boxes wound up containing grandpa’s old OED. I pulled it from the stack for a final perusal, and the cloth binding began to disintegrate and shred in my hands. I let the book fall open where it would, and saw myself staring at a once-white carnation in sepia tones, flattened crudely and unceremoniously within its pages. Never properly dried, it was by now a bit moldy and much worse for wear. I held it to my nose and was relieved that it still bore the carnation’s own bare fragrance, hardly to be scented, and not the thick stink of decay. The pages in which it had been pressed were stained and rippled from years of hiding the dead bloom.
I held it up to the light one more time, watched the sun cast through its translucent petals, and then, with a sigh, dropped it in my little garbage can before I put the dictionary back in the box of books. The memorial for Herman was long, long past, and the meaning of that flower would be lost on anyone else who found it. For some reason still not clear to me, I didn’t want it falling into the hands of someone who wouldn’t know what it symbolized. The thought of leaving it in that dictionary so it could be discarded with all the other excess printed matter we were donating to wherever, felt like a dishonor to my grandfather. Better, I thought, to release the flower with finality and due recognition.
But about the dictionary, I was less sentimental. It had served its purpose, and then significantly outlived it. It had no colorful supplemental sections and it was missing a lot of important words. The immutable truth it once contained had moved on and left it, bound in a printer’s frame, far behind. Its hidebound words, once so authoritative, had been made to look like fools from the vantage of a new era. And for the end of that heavy volume, no tears needed be shed and no flowers strewn. The immutability of truth was more evident in a dried carnation than in the recieved word of academics, but even that truth eventually earned reconsideration.
