In high school, my junior-year English teacher asked my class to write biweekly op-eds. While I rarely ever submitted something that was really good, I do remember handing one paper in with a little more confidence than the rest. I called it, “Why I Love Words.”
The other day, spurred by a fit of nostalgia and maybe boredom, I started digging through my mementos. I found a copy of my paper, marked up with bloody pen ink and shoved in the crevasse of a dense class folder. I had written the following:
“There is something so modest about words that make them so crucial, and yet they are often overlooked. Words are how we think, how we feel, and how we change the world; to me, words are the single most important skill one can have.”
Maybe I was overly optimistic then. But, I still hope to dedicate myself to something that has meaning — and I believe, wholeheartedly, that words are that thing. To quote Emma Morley in David Nicholls’s contemporary romance One Day, “Better by far to simply try and be good and be courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you.”
How do we manifest change in the little bits around us? I posit: words.
I speak of words and not sentences, or books and novels, or poetry and papers, or writing in general, because they are separate. With the exception of the letters that constitute them, words are the simplest structure we have. We connect words, like toy Lego pieces, until they materialize into some kind of worthwhile construction. Words are rudimentary and, yet, they are complex. Words are not easy.
Consider how often you speak, write, read, and think; how often your mind expresses itself in language; how often you look at a street sign or get in an argument or feel more than usual; how often you breathe and smile and laugh and cry and kiss and hurt and hug. Digest all that you do. It is all made of words — of split-second thoughts transitioning into action.
As an English major, I am often asked to justify what I do. To take what I hope to devote my life to and make it understandable or legitimize it with monetary gain and a tangible outcome. I never have quite the right answer. Frankly, it would take too long to explain. But I’ve finally found an explanation that seems to suffice.
I recently finished reading Rosa Montero’s book of essays The Danger to Be Sane. I discovered what I believe to be the most substantive argument for the necessity of words yet. In her chapter, “A Sea of Disorder,” Montero writes, “Existence is chaos and one of the services we novelists provide (one of the main reasons why you’re reading me now, why I read at all) is to give some semblance of causality and meaning to a reality that is nothing but sound and fury.”
Montero’s essays suggest a connection between the creative impulse and those struggling with emotional and mental wellbeing. Statistically, artists are more likely to suffer from mental health challenges. “Socrates always wore the same clothes, walked barefoot, and danced alone; Proust went to bed one day and never left it again…Agatha Christie wrote in the bathtub; Rousseau was a masochist and exhibitionist. Freud had a phobia of trains; Hitchcock, of eggs; Napoleon, of cats,” Montero continues. People make art, quite possibly, because it heals something inside us.
I don’t seek an English degree for a job title. To most realists, that may seem rather obvious. When I filled out my college applications and checked a box that would decide my future studies, and in parallel with this, my future life, it didn’t seem very noteworthy. I suppose that is abnormal. But finding a major wasn’t life altering. I didn’t think much about it. Choosing to study English was spontaneous. It was natural — and that’s kind of the point.
Artists do not claim to be scientists or doctors or agrarians. Individuals collectively read and write and think in words, not because it is necessary for our survival in a general sense, but because words are survival of the mind. Montero validates the urgency of words through a paradoxical sense; we choose words, whether recreationally or professionally, because they unravel the confusions, intricacies, and pains that knot our brains. Words are metabolic; they are the enzymes that break down vast dilemmas into manageable parts. Words help us persist, and yet, bizarrely, those most disposed to use words are bound by disproportionate struggle.
I am privileged. I do not feel pressure to find a lucrative job. In many ways, this absence of pressure allows me to pursue a degree that, according to our cultural norms, seems impractical. But, we must not confuse economic production with societal usefulness.
Words are useful. We all need them. But those who choose words most consistently are often the ones forced to cling to them. That’s why I choose words — they are my anxiety killer. I sought an English degree, and continue to pursue one, because words grant me organization. Organization of the mind — of thoughts. Choosing an English major was both a selfish and selfless act. Words have given me every semblance of balance I can hope to find, but they also provide for others. Words are reciprocal, mutual. They liberate and empower and revive.
The English major is our sustenance.
~ Maya Corrie `29
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