The other morning, as the pink of the morning outside danced across the sky like a dream, my young son said the word searching for the very first time.
This is the way it happened. He was walking around the room, pushing his wooden trolley, finding objects he wished to deliver to me and his dada. The trolley was his sled, he was Father Christmas. Last week in the charity shop he was given a Christmas hat and a woman on the street called him Santa’s little helper and he entered, this morning, into full role play. A green tractor for me, his new red fork lifter from the charity ship for his dada. Then he looked at me, and started to sing TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR. Half way through he said: ‘how I wonder what I am searching for… now I am searching for something special for you; how strange!’, and off he went again.
What a beautiful thing to use a word for the first time.
What a beautiful thing to witness someone you love so much make their way through the world; garnering words like the jewels they are.
I love, so much, to witness this falling in love with words.
“A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space.”
Anne Carson
I’ve been back with Anne Carson an awful lot this year. It started with trying to make a form of peace through literature with atrocious insomnia. I printed off her exquisite words on it, found myself in the same week with a copy of SLEEPLESS by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Heuston, and set to work, seeking, amongst the words, a way to reframe my unending battle with sleep. It worked, a little, I suppose, in that I have begun to feel so much less alone when insomnia arrives at the foot of the bed. I am there on the waves of the storm surrounded by the boats of so many other amazing women writers!
But I extended my reading of Carson way out, past the insomnia, towards the root of it all, the root of everything: the way she talks of thinking. The quote above is incredible to me in that she manages to get across such a wild and vast idea so simply and so effectively—
‘In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference.’ …
Thinking as
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to g l i m m e r s to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.