After I learned the alphabet, the complicated art of distinguishing between factual untruths and “not false errors” was first taught to me through words. Later, when I encountered the material experiences of lying and making things up, I found that I had the words to name them both. Words are our (however feeble) guide to what is treason and what is true.
Perhaps that is why one of my favorite sections in my personal library (now in a carefully labeled box) is the one that housed my dictionaries. For my generation (I was born in the first half of the 20th century) dictionaries mattered. Our elders treasured the Bible, or the complete works of Shakespeare, or Betty Crocker’s cookbook, or the six volumes of the Lagarde-Michard. For the generations of this third millennium, the beloved object may not be a book at all — perhaps a nostalgic Gameboy or an iPhone. But for many readers of my age, Petit Robert, Collins, Sopena, and Webster’s were the names of our libraries’ guardian angels.
In the days of my youth, for those of us who liked to read, the dictionary was a magical object of mysterious powers. In the first place, because we were told that here between the drab covers were all the words that named everything in the world that we knew and also everything in the world that we did not know, that the dictionary held the past (all those words spoken by our grandparents and great-grandparents, mumbled in the dark, which we no longer used) and the future (words to name what we might one day want to say, when a new experience would call for them). In the second place, because the dictionary, like a benevolent sibyl, answered all our questions when we stumbled over difficult words in a story).
Between the drab covers were all the words that named everything that we knew, and also everything that we did not know.
In school we were taught to be curious. Whenever we asked a teacher what something meant, we were told to “look it up in the dictionary!” We never thought of this as a punishment. On the contrary: With this command we were given the keys to a magic cavern in which one word would lead without rhyme or reason (except an arbitrary alphabetical reason) to the next. We would look up poudroie, for example, after reading in Charles Perrault’s Blue Beard, “Je ne vois rien que le Soleil qui poudroie, et l’herbe qui verdoie” (I see nothing but the dust-raising Sun and the grass shining green), and discover not only the sense in which Perrault used the word but that, in Canada, the verb poudroyer referred to snow “being chased by the wind (often in gusts).” And on the same page, this exquisite term, poudrin: in Newfoundland, light and icy rain. Several decades later, when caught in an icy downpour in St. John’s, Newfoundland, I found that I had the word to name the experience.
Aby Warburg, the great reader, defined for us all what he called a library’s “law of the good neighbor.” According to Warburg, the book with which one was familiar was not, in most cases, the book one needed. It was the unknown neighbor on the same shelf that contained the vital information. The same can be said of the words in a dictionary. In the electronic age, however, a virtual dictionary offers perhaps less chance for serendipity, or for the kind of happy distraction that filled Émile Littré with such pride: “Many times,” he reported, “it happened that, looking up a certain word, I became so interested that I would continue reading the next definition and then the next, as if I were holding in my hands an ordinary book.”
These magical properties were probably unsuspected that singular hot afternoon, almost three thousand years ago, when somewhere in Mesopotamia an inspired and anonymous ancestor of ours scratched in a piece of clay a slim list of Akkadian words and their meanings, thus creating what must have been, to all effects and purposes, a dictionary. For a dictionary designed much along the lines of ours today, we had to wait until the first century, when Pamphilus of Alexandria put together the earliest Greek lexicon with the words in alphabetical order. Did Pamphilus intuit that among his descendants would be swarms of illustrious lexicographers toiling in languages not yet born?
Dictionary makers are astonishing creatures who rejoice, above everything else, in words. Readers of dictionaries are equally passionate. Gabriel García Márquez, while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, would start every day reading the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española. Ralph Waldo Emerson read the dictionary for literary pleasure. “There is no cant in it,” he said, “no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.” Vladimir Nabokov found in Cambridge a secondhand edition of Vladimir Dahl’s Interpretative Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language in four volumes, and resolved to read 10 pages a day since, away from his motherland, “my fear of losing or corrupting, through alien influence, the only thing I had salvaged from Russia — her language — became positively morbid.”
As Nabokov understood, the language we use is not just an instrument — however feeble, inexact, treacherous — for communicating as best we can with others. The language that we speak defines us. Our thoughts, our ethics, our aesthetics are all, up to a point, defined by our language. Each particular language provokes or allows a certain way of thinking, elicits certain specific thoughts that come to our mind not only through but because of the language we call ours. Every translator knows that passing from one language to another is less an act of reconstruction than one of reconversion, in the profoundest sense of changing one’s system of belief. No French author would ever come up with “être ou ne pas être” for “To be or not to be,” any more than an English author would write “For a long time, I went to bed early” for “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Their language, not their experience, disallows it, because though human experience is universally the same, after Babel the words we have to name that common experience are different. After all, the identity of things depends on what we call them.
It is an old, old story. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, words are the beginning of everything. According to Talmudic commentators, two thousand years before the creation of heaven and earth, God brought into being seven essential things, the first among them the Torah, written in black fire on white fire. With some reluctance, because it feared the sinfulness of the world’s creatures, the Torah consented to the world’s creation. Learning of the divine purpose, the letters of the alphabet descended from God’s august crown, where they had been written with a pen of flames, and one by one the letters said to God: “Create the world through me! Create the world through me!” From the twenty-two letters, God chose bet, the first letter in the word baruch, or “blessed,” and thus it was that through bet the world came into being. The commentators note that the only letter that did not put forward its claims was the modest aleph; to reward its humility, God later gave aleph the first place in the alphabet.
From this ancient conviction stems the metaphor of God as author and the world as book: a book we try to read and in which we are also written.
Alberto Manguel is a writer, translator, editor, and critic, as well as director of the National Library of Argentina. This essay is adapted with permission from Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions, to be published in March by Yale University Press.
