At some point in Memphis, after my laptop was stolen, I began recording words on loose paper stuffed into the profuse pages of my dictionary. No computer meant no internet, which meant trolling for unknown terms in my large cochineal Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. It had been a graduation gift from my parents when, at seventeen, I was preparing for a new life in Boston, far from their home in Montgomery and my high school in Mobile. Although I must surely have been given the book at some gathering or other congratulatory event, I clearly remember opening the package alone in my room at my parents’ house. The generous windows welcomed in huge swathes of summer light, marking out the shifting rectangles of warmth that I followed around the room for catnaps when I still lived at home. With that familiar illumination, I perused my new treasure, this book that would slowly reveal new thoughts, useful terms, hopelessly precise jargon, and a raft of memories floating along behind each.
The practice of tracking each of these things came to an unmemorable stop with the purchase of a new computer. Mac’s dashboard screen, so helpful for keeping up with sports stats and stock prices, lets you link directly to an on-line dictionary, putting you at just a few keystrokes’ distance from the definitions you need. Searching for and learning terms this way happens in the moment, however, putting the emphasis directly on the need, not on any kind of pleasure or enjoyment of the process itself. You lose the phylogeny of a word’s slow insertion into your vocabulary, the seductive tangibility of the crepitant pages, the numinous experience of an unexpectedly apt word jumping from the page in its unmistakable bold print, as though to say, I’m here! Use me! Pass me on to others and make me your own!
Phylogeny, I looked up while an undergraduate. I no longer recall the source of that word, but the words which precede and follow it fire up the associative links in my head, rushing me from one possibility to another. In the penciled chaparral of script filling my unlined printer paper, the back of which contains the final page of an essay by my mother on Falstaff’s character in Henry IV, Part II, I find the following list leading up to phylogeny: cognomen, opalescent, lambency, lambent, antinomy. After phylogeny come: neoteny, numinous, affinal, consanguineal. I wonder, was this list not drawn from the theory I read for a course on sociology and anthropology? Certainly cognomen, phylogeny, affinal, and consanguineal could slide unnoticed into any text on cultural exploration and family relationships. But opalescent? Numinous?
Now there is a word which I am glad to have learned. Whenever I discover it in new places, I feel the thrill of discovering an old friend’s good fortune in unexpected circumstances. I have used the word in poems and love letters, as a one-word description of my favorite person, to explain the strange choices that have led me here, to a singular moment in a particular place, where I never expected to find myself, or to find myself writing, describing the way words demand to be written, as a sort of birth certificate marking their entry into my intellectual life.
An amalgamation of inconsequential circumstances led me to once again take up my dictionary and its loose-leaf additions while reading Speak, Memory. A lucky amalgamation, that is, as Nabokov is far too erudite for the internet dictionary to be of more help than hindrance. To search online after every unfamiliar word in Speak, Memory would be to invite a distracting systole of attention, drawing me away from the slightly faded pages and directing me to the screen’s eclat, then pulling back again, only to rush in towards the broken sentence abandoned for semiotic insight, my eyes searching for the syntagma where I left off.
How awful to be so torn. Instead, with the dictionary resting open on my lap, it becomes a table on which Speak, Memory can spread itself out, the halves flapping open like Nabokov’s beautiful winged butterflies. The dictionary is a foundation, whose material being reflects the other’s hard covers and gum smell. The two can relate to each other, and I can travel, back and forth, along the path established between them by the mutual experience of simply being a book. No division of attention here, but rather the creation of a conversation, in which one asks and the other answers, all--it feels like--for my benefit.
I wish that, like Nabokov, I could confirm my memories. If only there was a witness to my linguistic ramblings, who could remind me gently, Oh, no. “Antinomy” was definitely in Infinite Jest. Remember? When the boys play Eschaton? Or, “opprobrious”? That’s one of Matthew Arnold’s, back when he was on his religious kick. But then, I retract my wish.
For isn’t one of the most startling qualities of words their ability to shed associations and be seen in a new light? This is how poetry can so affect the senses, shocking us into a vision of a dead crab shell as a little traveling case with such lavish lining! Or slowly, carefully reversing our expectations to reveal shepherds’ feeding their lambs with teapots rather than teats. Just knowing what a word means and where it comes from does not make me its master. If such were the case, every time I wrote down a new definition and placed it back into my dictionary, I would have merely added another static datum to the database in my head. I refuse to treat words as static. I would rather not remember where they all came from, if it reminds me to treat each one as an unlimited province of possibility, overlapping with some other provinces, and coterminous with the rest, as far as the mind’s eye can see. As the user, not the master, of this language, I do not own my words, but usufruct allows me to enjoy their lambent fruits.
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