Rereading...

I just finished the last book in my favorite series, The Chronicles of Elantra.  And I am tempted to do what I did the last time I finished it:  start the entire series again.

That is so ... odd ... for me, the once owner of over 2,000 books.  Yes, I have always been a re-reader, but I have primarily been the one who carts home a few dozen books from the library, after sitting on the floor for a few hours hunting through the bookshelves.  The last time I went to the library I fainted.  That was nearly five years ago.  SIGH.

Being slow on the tech-uptake, a couple of years ago I finally learned how to borrow Kindle books.  The problem is that I have no real way of figuratively browsing the shelves for eBooks.  And the selection is limited.  For example, I did attempt to read the Heroes of Olympus books, but I had to wait a few weeks to a few months between books because of holds on the eBooks.  No longer a literacy professor and no longer able to stand and bend and sit and stand and bend and sit and stand and bend and sit before shelves and shelves and shelves of books, I am woefully out of touch with what is out there for me to read.

Over the past five years, I have begun rereading all of my favorite books at home in earnest.  Then, I started purchasing a few of them on Kindle, my most favorites, because it is very, very, very difficult for me to hold a book for any length of time.  I adore my Kindle Paperwhite.

Over the past two years, I have begun reading solely on my Kindle.

Over the past year, I have begun reading solely The Chronicles of Elantra. [Not counting my study reading.]

I love the series because I identify so very strongly with Kaylin, even though I am not her, I am not an officer of the law, and I have no magical abilities.  I love the series because Kaylin struggles mightily with her past, with shame, and with a longing to hide who she really is from those who have become her friends.  I love the series because the magic she wields has to do with words.

Not this time, but the last time through, I started highlighting (I am still unfamiliar with highlighting on Kindles) and bookmarking every reference to shame, to hope, and to words (and language).  This second reading of all eleven books (the twelfth is due out in October),  I was a bit surprised at how much about words (and language) that I had missed on my first round of highlighting.  I suspect I am still missing key passages.

Key passages were I still capable of writing about these books.
Key passages for weaving together the message of words.
Key passages to demonstrate why, I think, these books are the ones I'd pick for the deserted island.

Writing, which has always been my greatest and easiest of skills, has become so very difficult for me.  Gone is the girl who blew threw her dissertation in two months time.  Gone is the girl who wrote dozens of A+ research papers the night before they were do.  Gone is the girl who could whip together a marketing piece (content) on an hour's notice.

The laboriousness of writing, the loss of my pen, was the handwriting on the proverbial wall for me.  I knew my time at work was limited.  I knew the devastation that was taking place in my brain.  For I was making mistakes in grammar and construction.  And I was struggling to finish projects by their due date.  I worked harder than I have ever worked to mask those errors.  I begged friends to proof my work for me.  But that handwriting was impossible to ignore.  As it is when I try to think about writing about the power of words in this series that I adore.

When my friend Mary and her husband where here for his graduation last month, I tried to talk with them about the concept.  They listened (maybe politely), but we did not delve into the concept.  There was no academic exchange.  There was no bending of acumen.  There was only my fumbling to speak why it is that I love how the author is using words in magic.

Not any words.
True Words.

True Words have power and life and have meaning that never changes.  What Kaylin, and those who walk with her on her path, struggle to do is understand that meaning with the words they have in their own language(s).  And—the irony is not lost on me—the bulk of the dangers Elantra faces is from arcanists and magicians trying to create their own True Words or trying change a True Word.  As in End-of-the-World dangers.

In this last book (or maybe the one before), for example, something new I noticed is Kaylin realizing that she doesn't need to speak the True Words to speak them.  Her voice is not required.  Just as her eyes are not required for seeing them.  Seeking Truth and allowing it to ... be ... is what using the words ultimately is.  But all my words about True Words and power and life and strokes and dots and walking amongst the pieces of words to restore or to move or to take hold of them are mere dross.  They all fall short in my head.  And they most certainly fall short each time I have tried to even think about writing about the books.

But maybe I will just start adding quotes to my entries.  Things that I like, thinks that speak to me, Myrtle.  Things that speak to my scholarly mind ... the bits of it that are left.

"The room was invaded by scent: rose and lilac, honey, water new with spring green; sweat, the aroma of tea—tea?—and sweet wind, the meal of green.  The green.  Behind her eyes she could sense the bowers of ancient forest, could almost hear the rustles of great leaves.

"But here, too, she found silence.  The silence of the smug, the arrogant, the pretentious; the silence of concern, of compassion; the silence of grief too great for simple words; the silence that follows a child's first cry.  She found so many silences, she wondered what the use of langue was; words seemed impoverished and lessened." ~Michelle Sagara, Cast in Courtlight, location 4330.

I like the exploration of silence and I like Kaylin's thought about how words seemed impoverished and lessened in silence.  This is in the second book of the series.  Kaylin is new to the use of her power outside of her own off-hours work of healing children in the orphanage and helping the midwives in difficult births.  What she knows of True Words, here, is absolutely nothing compared to the eleventh book, although you could argue that a year and several disasters later, she still knows nothing.   Although, because I really do not understand highlighting in Kindle, I cannot show you how Kaylin discovers (or perhaps embraces) that the power of True Words is not dependent on what she knows.  Meaning is not made in her understanding.  Nor does her understanding either bind or loose that power.

Sometimes, when I am reading, it seems like I am glimpsing, just for a moment, what the power of the Living Word really is.  This is NOT a Christian series, nor am I trying to co-opt it as one.  I am just utterly and absolutely fascinated by a magic wielded not by some powerful magician, but by one chosen to bear True Words writ on her body.

I will write here one more quote, that I emailed to a friend but got no response, because it struck me so ... deeply:

"You are a vessel.  A container.  You are the parchment on which the words might both be written and preserved."  ~Michelle Sagara, Cast in Sorrow, page 350. 

Maybe once day I might write about the wonder I felt at reading the metaphor of a vessel (one used in the bible), morphed into paper so as to fully extend the depth of what it means to be a vessel—no, not merely a jar of clay—coupled with the thought of how when something is written is it preserved.   Wondrous thoughts not based on the context so much as to words and concepts special to me in the Living Word.

In context?  Kaylin had grasped and thus preserved a True Name an enemy was trying to destroy lest it be lost forever.  For Barrani (one of the immortals in Elantra, a city with a mixture of mortal and immortal races) life begins with the reception of a True Name, taken from the waters of the Lake of Life.