by Eric Rauchway

When we put one word in another's place as we edit, it is a bit as if we chose this stone, rather than that, for a dry-stone wall. Which is to say, we plan the course and size of our project, but haven't the liberty to forge our own materials. Instead they necessarily influence us: pick so choosily as we may, we cannot invent the blocks with which we build, and their peculiar shapes inflect the span, reach, and strength of our construction. We may have the sense that "what we mean" exists before we put it into words, and we hunt for the right words to serve that sense of prior meaning, but this is only as true as that wall's existing prior to our orderly setting of stones one atop another--like the planned wall's power to stop cattle from straying out of pasture and into plantings, the meaning has only a potential, notional force before we set it into phrasing. So far the analogy holds, but not much farther. Because except at some atomic or abstrusely legal level we and the field of stones stand distinct from one another, whereas the words in our heads are part of us. When we choose words for writing, we ask ourselves the best way to say what we mean--if you are as careless of your reputation for sanity as I, you might ask aloud. And not to indulge in a sophomoric ontological crisis here, but how is the asking "I" distinct from the asked "I"? And where, if not from some field in which like stones words lie half buried, annoying the plow, does the asked "I" find the words to say what the asking "I" means? William James includes one's composed words as property and, as property, a part of oneself:

An ... instinctive impulse drives us to collect property; and the collections thus made become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. There are few men who would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long construction of their hands or brains--say an entomological collection or an extensive work in manuscript--were suddenly swept away.

But James speaks here not only of composed works--it is the entomological collection, not the bugs themselves, that are oneself--but of extensive composed works--indeed, a "life-long construction." (Though I don't think you need to go that far--I regard this blog-post as mine, poor thing and a mere morning's work though it be.) But what about the smaller parts of our language, the words and phrases we have in our heads and put on paper? They too are us, not as property, but as constituent parts: we are as writers the sum of what we have read as readers. As James also says, we cannot will anything we have not once experienced--we cannot write any word we have not once read. (Coinages excepted, but even the most prolific inventors need to restrain themselves lest they render their prose opaque.) I watch my son sit in the reading room of our local library, plowing through a stack of books variously frivolous and deep, and though I don't know quite what he makes of them all, I know he is stocking up things to say and ways to say them. And for me, as I'm re-reading one essay in proof and another in manuscript, I'm making changes based on--well, I don't know precisely what: a sense of the sound of things, their fit to my meaning, my feeling, as James says, that one phrasing is "warmer" than another and therefore more properly mine. I'm confident there's some more recent source than James on the relationship between our language and ourselves. And to borrow from him one more time, "I am contented to wallow in my grossest ignorance of Greek." So, would any of the online philosophers who are knowledgeable in such matters, or any other better informed readers, please consider helping me out with some recommended reading on the subject?