Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. If language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it in something like the way good farmers care for the life of the soil.
from the first chapter
It is the artist’s vocation to surprise us into remembering that the ordinary elements of our messy, material lives are gifts. Rembrandt restores us to a sense of the sacramentality of daily life. This daily life provides the terms in which he “reads” the biblical stories and invites us to read them—moments of real encounter among real people working out their salvation with a God who made and makes himself known in palpable, visible, surprising ways.
from the introduction
Vermeer invites us into an environment rich with unspoken feeling. There is in his portraits of women a quality of unconscious self-disclosure that makes them poignant; they are pensive, attentive, cautious, reticent, apprehensive, or deep in concentration. The viewer’s vantage point enforces a kind of dramatic irony; we know something about them they do not, perhaps could not, know themselves. What we know about them is mediated by the intelligent, generous eye of the artist whose work it was to enable us to see as he saw. These women are the objects of honorable and honoring attention that endows them, their work, the circumstances of their lives, with particular dignity.
from the introduction
He left us an invitation: say yes. The paintings call for our consent—to relinquish, to reorganize, to reimagine, to see into, to see through. To let solid objects be verbs rather than nouns and to recognize the surging life force in an olive tree or a bank of wild iris urgent with the work of growing purple. If you soften your vision just a little and let your eye relax into submission, you may get a glimpse of the “unified field” where forces come together and negotiate their differences in intimate and energetic play.
from the introduction
We all have a private vocabulary of words associated with particular moments of discovery. Psychotherapists have built empires on this truth simply by paying systematic attention to word associations and considering the immanent logic of the connections people make between one word and another. The fact that the word “lilac” recalls the wallpaper in a grandmother’s bathroom for one, a line from Whitman for another, or a feeling of inexplicable sadness for yet another testifies to the way words constellate complex, shifting, layered patterns of meaning and feeling.
from the introduction
To invite you to meditate on elemental things, the poems in this collection are grouped under four headings that represent the first “periodic table of elements”-Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. The ancients believed that all things were made of these, and the larger truth of that belief lies in meditation on the subtleties and complexities of each, both in their physical properties and in their symbolic richness.
from the introduction
The same ideological forces that shaped domestic architecture in the U.S. also shaped other forms of cultural expression, including, of course, our literature. The way we build and inhabit our houses has a good deal to do with the way we tell our stories. In both architectural and literary theory ongoing debates have focused on tensions between apparently opposed principles: beauty and utility, simplicity and decorativeness, imitation and originality, convention and experimentation.
from the introduction
A course in literature and medicine can train the empathetic imagination. All literature courses ought to do this. All medical training ought to include this. Literature teaches us in unique ways to imagine the other, to use the imagination as an instrument of compassion, to tolerate ambiguity, to dwell in paradox, to consider multiple points of view, and to recognize that the truth about any human experience is, as Mark Van Doren puts it, that “there is no single way it can be told.”
from the introduction
Conversion doesn’t always require
a fall from a horse or three days
of blindness. Sometimes we see
the light at the edge of the field
when the gaze is fixed on the teacup
or we are chewing our pencils
looking for a word.
from “Halo Effect”
Many post-World War I autobiographies focus on episodes of crisis. In a century torn by global strife and breakdown of cultural institutions, autobiography provides a way of recovering from crisis and restructuring one’s reality–a healing act that involves the writer in a “wrestle with words and meanings that can be deeply regenerative. Narration can be a way of purging guilt and pain, recentering the self, and reconnecting with community after a shattering experience has driven one into silence and isolation.
from the introduction