A Bunch of Words

Kind of. I was up at the office today, and I ran into my friend Kevin. I hardly see him this semester, so I stopped in his office to talk for a while. He had just been to a conference up in San Francisco giving a paper, and he told me that it was "an experience." It kind of depressed him. He said that the conference was held in this swanky (I've never used that word in my life) hotel, and the professors all wore their suits and spent their days trying to be smarter than one another and trying to prove to the others that they were smarter than everyone. And they talked about talking (a conference on rhetoric). And then, Kevin said, they would walk outside the hotel, and sitting in the streets would be the homeless people. And Kevin said that it kept hitting him the entire week how we English major people are mainly just a bunch of talk.

He's right. We sit around talking about talking. And you know we English majors--we're a bunch of wacko liberals who talk largely about how horrible capitalism is and how powerful people use rhetoric to sustain a system that keeps the powerful on top and the homeless in the streets. We talk about marginalization and ethics and we can pretty much demonize everyone. And we do...gleefully. And a lot of times we're correct in the things we say. But we're such damn hypocrites. All of that Ivory Tower stuff they say about academia is so true. We gripe and complain about the way things are, and then we walk out of our fancy hotel and refuse to see the people living in the streets. We do it over and over again. And we write papers that nobody but us will read or care about, and we read books that nobody will ever read. And we teach classes so that we can make our students part of the elite like us...It's kind of depressing...It's really depressing...

I like words. But they scare me (the very reason I'm an English major). They're so powerful. They have that tendency to get out too far ahead of us and get away from us. And that's were the real test comes in for we people who love our words so much. We've got to have the guts to follow them.

The problem the English departments have is the same problem the churches (that the English departments detest so much) so often have. We've got some good words. Particularly the church...we in the church have got some really good words. And we sit in our pretty buildings and our pretty clothes and say them over and over again. And we all look and sound awfully silly doing it.

We need to keep that ability to keep telling those words to ourselves. But we need some courage, so that we may have the humility, to live them out.