A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable about the Difficult Question of How to Be Yourself – The Marginalian

“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a generation after her. To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons propping up our sense of reality: concepts and stories. Without the concept of a table, you would be staring blankly at the assemblage of incongruent surfaces and angles. Without arranging the facts and events of your life into a story — that narrative infrastructure of personhood — it would not be you looking out of your eyes. To know yourself is to tell a congruent story of who you are, a story in which your concept of yourself coheres even as it evolves. Without this central organizing principle of selfhood, life would be a continuous identity crisis.

Crisis, of course, is important — it is, as Alain de Botton writes in his deeply assuring meditation on the importance of breakdowns, “an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” There come times when the tedium and turmoil of being yourself become too much to bear, exasperate you, exhaust you, make you wish to be someone else, send you searching for a different organizing principle. (It takes some living to reach that point, which is why midlife can be such a time of tumult and transformation.)

We live and die with these questions, rooted in our earliest childhood, in those first reckonings with what makes us ourselves, those first experiments in self-acceptance. They are deep and difficult questions, but Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston bring great playfulness and delight to them in their second collaboration, The Dictionary Story (public library) — a charming fable about the yearning for inner congruence and the existential exhale of self-acceptance, and a love letter to language carried by Oliver’s joyful paintings, his singular hand-lettering, and Sam’s symphonic collage compositions.

The story begins on the bookshelf, where “most of the time, all the books knew what they were about” — except one book. Because she contains “all the words that had ever been read, which meant she could say all the things that could ever be said,” Dictionary is perpetually unsure of herself, her organizing principle not coherence but alphabetic order, the words in her not a story but a list.

It is often the most unexpected and improbable things that save us from ourselves: An Alligator suddenly leaps from the A pages and, ravenous for a snack, heads to the D pages for a Donut, who, not wanting to be eaten, darts across the alphabet.

A chaos of delight ensues as other words come alive as other characters — a Ghost, a Cloud, a Queen, a Tornado, the Moon — each trying to understand their part in the confusing story writing itself through their animacy.

Dictionary’s thrill at finally having a story unfold on her pages turns into terror as things get out of hand. Suddenly, her natural order starts to look a whole lot more desirable than this unbridled disarray of characters with incompatible desires. (And who hasn’t felt the discomposing overwhelm of trying to make too many changes to the story of life all at once, to harmonize the discord of conflicting desires, only to end up in even deeper incoherence.)

In the end, Dictionary calls on her friend Alphabet to restore her to herself — a lovely reminder that the greatest gift a friend can give is to sing back to you the song of yourself when you forget it.

Couple The Dictionary Story with Oliver and Sam’s previous collaboration, A Child of Books, then revisit The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — John Koenig’s uncommonly wonderful invented words (based on real etymologies from around the world) for what we feel but cannot name, words like maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”) and apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person”).