Con Texere

I am glad that dictionaries still exist, and that people at my library still ask for them. They're not exactly practical, so I can't quite say why it is I'm glad about this, but I am. For the past few weeks we've kept one on the desk next to the hole punch and staplers because people were asking for it so often. It occasionally gets reshelved, and even though just now I had to get up and pull it from the shelf, the big heavy heft of the thing, I was glad to have to do it.

I, myself, haven't used a real dictionary in so long I can't remember. Likely it was back in high school. I look up words often, though, on my computer, on my phone. Any time I'm reading and come across one I don't know I pull out my phone and search it. When I was younger, I'd make lists to take to the dictionary later. I get words sent to me by email every day and I know a lot of the words-of-the-day I receive already, but I honestly have trouble making use of all the great words I come across and try to save.
I haven't used a single interesting word in this post so far, for example.

So, here's one I learned today—carillonneur:
one who plays the carillon:
a set of fixed, chromatically-tuned bells sounded by hammers controlled from a keyboard.
(Thanks Merriam-Webster)

There is something really lovely about the act of physically searching out a word, running your finger down the thin, shaky pages, finding it nestled among other definitions. Half the time I'd look up a word, I'd find myself intrigued by at least one other it shared a page with. It's gratifying, in a sense, holding all that non-contextual language in your hands. Although, I suppose it does have context. Everything does. Con together, texere, to weave.

I also quite love that the word text comes from the Latin word for weave.

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth. [Robert Bringhurst, "The Elements of Typographic Style"]

The struggle has reared its ugly head again recently, in terms of making sense out of the nexus of passion, occupation, vocation, and money. I got passed up for a full-time job a few weeks ago. It's not so much that I'm disappointed at missing out on the job itself (though, of course, I was at first—full-time library work sounds like a boon, even in an academic library, even at a religious university), but more so that it reminded me of a certain degree of instability. Then, when I considered it further, I realized this could be my whole life—the writer's life, never permanent, never stable. This thought terrified me in the shower after I got the news, as I pictured a future where I'll never be able to afford a vacation, or health insurance for my children, an immediate future where I can't even afford to continue living by myself, as I do now, a life of constant hustle, rummaging, stretching, searching.

I never pictured that for myself, or really wanted it, despite always knowing I had no choice but to be a writer. I thought I'd find some way out of it, some way to beat it. I'll land a full-time job, I thought, no problem. It took a friend of mine an entire year after graduation to find one, and in a little over two months, it will be one year since I graduated. But something strange is happening the longer I wrestle with this—I'm finding that this is the life I want to chase.

I don't want to be where I am right now forever, obviously.

But I have at least assumed the clarity of mind now to know that what I had claimed and guessed at all along is actually quite true. I have no choice.

Writing is both what I am good at and what I love. Words, the pursuit of language and communication, is my raison d'etre, so to speak, but for so long I was afraid it may not be. That it was simply a hobby, and that I was a fairweather friend of it, an impostor among my peers who pursued it much more seriously, who needed it more than I did, who would inevitably gain and deserve success more than I ever could.

I don't think that anymore. If the Capital-The Capital-S Struggle has taught me anything, it is that I cannot and will not settle for anything less than this pursuit of words in whatever ways I can scrobble together. I always knew that it would not be easy, but I no longer think that is a deal breaker for me. I no longer think I'm incapable, not strong enough, to go after this life and make something of it.

I still wake up at night clenching my jaw, wondering if I'll have enough money to move anywhere other than back into my parents' house this summer when my lease runs out; I still have days and nights and weeks where I have no idea when my rocket will come (thanks, Jason Mraz, although I never thought I'd speak those words in my life) or where exactly it will take me, but I do know these things:

1. I am a writer.
2. I am in love with the love of my life.
3. I will do whatever the pursuit of a life involving the above two unchangeable principles requires of me, because it is the only possibility.

These are not choices, but truths. And there is stability in that, even when it's hard to find elsewhere.