"To name things is to tame them."

That’s a line from Tim O’Brien’s wonderful and eccentric Tomcat in Love, and it coincides with a discussion recently held in one of my MFA classes. In fact, our compulsion to match names to things and experiences is a topic that writers and philosophers have been discussing for thousands of years. So my question—does O’Brien’s Thomas H. Chippering have it right? Is to name a thing to rob it of its wild and unknowable thingness? Or is it, instead, our only way of holding onto that essence? (And might that be the same thing, anyway?)

It may sound silly—but this is the question at the heart of what we as writers do. We gulp our coffee or sip our wine and lean into our keyboards, grappling for the word, the phrase, the sentence that will finally, cathartically, do justice to something real. Here’s why I think we do it: We are (consciously or not) terrified of losing the experiences of our lives to the fickleness of memory. We search so hard for the right words—we write books, tell stories, sing songs—because in the telling, the experience lives. And so we have, too.

What do you think? Why do you read or write? And what have you read that comes closest to matching the experience of living?

Comments (0) 20.10.2008. 00:28