The Comfort of Words

My attention has been so focused on the devastation along the Gulf Coast that I feel like my brain has less than its usual space for writing-related thoughts. Still, I find such great comfort in words--they are like a balm to me, so soothing somehow--and so I have been writing and reading a great deal. By reading the news reports, the posts of people on the New Orleans websites asking about their neighborhoods or family members, and writing in this blog, I have found a way to maintain some semblance of equanimity, which is a difficult thing to do in normal times, and even harder when a place you love and the people you love are suffering through such dire times.

And even when I haven't been focused on hurricane-related news or writing, the power of words anchors me. In the last few days I've been working on a copyediting test--still trying to get a job, remember?--and while I was in the middle of it, I just disappeared into the language, into getting the words to sound and look right. I fell into "the zone" and just felt strangely buoyed by my efforts to make language communicate even better, to make the words harmonize. Each time I turned the page of my massive unabridged dictionary, I felt a delicious sense of ease come over me, like I was sure to know all the answers to the questions that had been nagging me. Of course, I realize that this is a somewhat artificial sense of ease--I don't have all the answers now that I've looked up some words any more than I did yesterday, but there is comfort in the endeavor of it--the endeavor to fix something, if but for a moment, if only for one little black word--in a world of impermanence.

Last night, when I was exhausted, I opened a book I've been reading: The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer. It's fabulous, and though it took a little while for the voice of the narrator to grow on me, I'm so eager to read it now that I pick it up whenever I have a moment. There's comfort in that, knowing that there's a doorway I can open when I need to. It's such a release and such a relief, and, to use this week's inescapable lexicon, it is very much a feeling like a pressure rushing through a broken levee, to open that book. And to see, too, a character who lives through a life of tragedy and several disasters, one of them a catastrophic earthquake, and to do it as we all do, as a human being doing the very best he can.