Tag Archives: language

How Jesus Talked

08 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Religion, Speeches

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The_Calling_of_Saint_Matthew-Caravaggo_(1599-1600)

“Biblical Hebrew developed as a desert language, and it exhibits the economy of desert people. The very opposite of Victorian English, which never uses fewer words if it can use more, Hebrew will not use three words if two will do. It will not use two words if one will do. If it can get away with silence instead of words, it will do so — and much of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is to be found in its silences. This is because in the desert every movement is dehydrating; and desert people learn to think before they move and think before they speak. They are elegant conservers of energy.

When Amos, the great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, tries to move the people to abandon their trivial pursuit of economic status and to take account of the poor, he says most beautifully:

Ve-yigal ka-maim mishpat, ve-tsedaka k’nachal eytahn,

which I would translate, ‘Let your justice flow like water, and your compassion like a never-failing stream.’ The English takes twenty syllables, the Hebrew only fifteen — and this is Hebrew at its most expansive…

If the misplaced reverence of translators can make the people of the Bible sound as they never did in life, no one brings on attacks of reverence more often than Jesus, who was actually humorous, affectionate, and down-to-earth, who spoke to his friends and followers in a clear and bracing manner, was often blunt, sometimes vulgar, and always arresting. Never did he employ the dreary, self-righteous, even priggish sound that some of his admirers would wish for him. Despite the popularity of the King James Version, Jesus was not a 17th-century Englishman…

In Mark’s Gospel, the most primitive of the four gospels, the first words that Jesus speaks are: ‘The Time has come. The Kingdom of God draws near…’ The next word is almost always translated as ‘repent’ or ‘convert’ — which makes Jesus sound like a sidewalk freak with a placard in his hands. But the word Mark uses is metanoiete, which means literally in Greek ‘change your minds.’ For the Greeks, the mind was considerably more than it is for us. It was the core of the person, the center of his being. The word we would use is ‘heart.’ So… I have translated the Greek as ‘Open your hearts’ — a far cry from ‘repent!'”

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Excerpted from Thomas Cahill’s speech “Close Encounters with the People of the Past”.

Cahill, who has written some of the most enjoyable and broadly accessible popular history out there, has published a few books that hover around the ancient Greeks and early Christian church. I recommend starting with Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

The image: a section of Caravaggio’s 1599 masterpiece The Calling of Saint Matthew.

Related reading:

I Like Words

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Film, Humor, Writing

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Words

Here’s the story: In 1934, a twenty-five-year-old named Robert Pirosh quit his well-paying but tedious job as a copywriter in New York and moved to Hollywood, hoping to kickstart his dream career as a screenwriter. Arriving in California, Pirosh compiled the names and addresses of as many top studio execs as he could, then proceeded to send each of them what is without doubt one of the most colorful, creative, and irresistible cover letters ever produced. This document secured him three interviews, one of which would land him a job as a junior writer at MGM. And as they say, the rest is history: Pirosh would go on to win the Oscar for best original screenplay for his 1949 war drama Battleground, but his other masterpiece — the one which first set him on his path to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre — is reproduced in full below:

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “v” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words. May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh

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The 1934 cover letter sent by Robert Pirosh to Hollywood executives.

I took the above picture a few minutes ago.

Read on:

  • Mark Twain’s hilarious, furious letter to a snake oil salesman
  • J.R.R. Tolkien’s smart, sharp letter replying to a Nazi publisher
  • Ernest Hemingway’s first letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

Robert Pirosh

The Importance of Oscar Wilde

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Literature

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Oscar Wilde

“It was really Oscar Wilde who awoke language in my head in a way like nobody else, and I think also discovering the kind of man Oscar Wilde was, was an enormous influence as well. The fact that you could be such a towering intellect, such a lord of language and be charming and graceful, kind, good natured, but also unhappy and unlucky was a great discovery for an adolescent — because one of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you’re never going to match up and that everybody else’s life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day or you were somehow not invited.

And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you. They welcome it. Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they’re truly great rather than making you feel they’re tall, they make you feel you’re tall, that they’re greatness as it were improves you. They used to say of Oscar Wilde that when you got done from a dinner table you felt funnier and wittier and cleverer. Now a lot of brilliant people make you feel less funny, less clever, less witty because they’re so clever, witty and funny, but he had the opposite effect. A bit like what Shakespeare said about Falstaff, not just a wit, but a cause of wit in others.”

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Stephen Fry, speaking with Big Think about the influence of Oscar Wilde.

As with Fry, Oscar Wilde — specifically in his lone novel The Picture of Dorian Gray — was for me among the first writers who stirred that epiphany, “This is someone whose voice I understand.” Reading that book as a teenager, I found an author who simultaneously connected with, and transcended, my conception of the world.

Wilde’s seminal comedy The Importance of Being Earnest was first performed this week in 1895 at St James’s Theatre in London.

Sehnsucht

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Biography

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Julian Barnes“There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. I remember my first visit to Paris in 1964; I was eighteen. Each day I did my cultural duty — galleries, museums, churches; I even bought the cheapest seat available at the Opéra Comique (and remember the impossible heat up there, the impossible sightlines, and the impossible-to-comprehend opera). I was lonely in the Métro, on the streets, and in the public parks where I would sit on a bench by myself reading a Sartre novel, which was probably about existential isolation. I was lonely even among those who befriended me. Remembering those weeks now, I realize that I never went upwards — the Eiffel Tower seemed an absurd, and absurdly popular, structure — but I did go down. I visited the Paris sewers, entering from somewhere near the Pont de l’Alma for a guided boat tour; and from the Place Denfert-Rochereau I descended into the catacombs, my candle lighting up the neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls.

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something’. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the ‘inconsolable longing’ in the human heart for ‘we know not what’. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something — or, in our case, for someone. Sehnsucht describes the first kind of loneliness. But the second kind comes from the opposite condition: the absence of a very specific someone. Not so much loneliness as her-lessness.”

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From the new book Levels of Lifeby Julian Barnes.

As any fairly consistent reader of this blog will know, one of the books I’ve enjoyed most recently has been Barnes’s meditation on mortality Nothing to Be Frightened Of. It’s an almost preternaturally honest and self-flagellating look at what death means to someone who doubts both the existence of a personal god and the prospect of an eternal life to come.

Nothing is a darkly philosophical examination of death, bearing all its considerable weight on the cerebellum. (And do your brain a favor by reading it.) But Levels, which Barnes wrote after experiencing the most intimate deprivation of his life, is a story of the heart. The text is part history, part literature, and part memoir — a memoir about the collision between what you know and what you feel when you have been devastated, when your knees have hit the earth, when you have been leveled by life. The final third of the book (that memoir part) is probably the heaviest piece of writing I’ve ever read. Yet its final two pages, and especially its closing thought, are somehow so spiritually resilient, even buoyant, that you’ll turn the final page, glance up, and feel reoriented somewhat positively towards existence.

Wittgenstein on God and Belief

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, — life can force this concept on us.

It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference. It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of my rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it.

Suppose someone said: ‘What do you believe, Wittgenstein? Are you a sceptic? Do you know whether you will survive death?’ I would really, this is a fact, say ‘I can’t say. I don’t know’, because I haven’t any clear idea what I am saying when I am saying, ‘I don’t cease to exist.'”

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Excerpts from Culture and Value and Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition). Two quotes to supplement Wittgenstein’s interpretation of religious conversion and the religious worldview:

“Credo quia absurdum.” (“I believe because it is absurd”)
Tertullian, De Carne Christi 

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?

In terms of the final paragraph, Wittgenstein’s answer is my favorite reply I’ve yet read to the question, “What do you think happens after death?”

I can’t say. I don’t know, because I haven’t any clear idea of what I am saying when I am saying, ‘I don’t cease to exist.’

Acute and essential. I can’t believe I’ve never thought of (or ever heard of) that line of reasoning.

Also, for a very condensed introduction to Wittgenstein’s fixation with objects and qualities, read the illustration below (from his dissection of Augustine’s theory of language in Philosophical Investigations).

“When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples; the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of the voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires…

Think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked ‘five red apples’. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked ‘apples’, then he looks up the word ‘red’ in a table and finds a color sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word ‘five’ and for each number he takes an apple of the same color as the sample out of the drawer.—It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words—’But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word “five”?’ Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word ‘five’? No such thing was in question here, only how the word ‘five’ is used.”