Letter #202: The Flesh-Made Word

The Soul Provides the Spark

Spengler.

We started this substack in an effort to recreate the sort of conversations we’ve had over the years in the hope they would be as edifying to others as they’ve been to us. But recently, we’ve noted how difficult it is to give the written word the experiential dynamic of live talk.

So it was a great pleasure, when I was in Nashville on Friday, to see you in the flesh and have the very kind of conversation these letters are meant to recreate.

In the course of that conversation, you mentioned an experiment you'd read about in the journal Science. A miniscule piece of human brain was reconstructed at a visible level. It revealed a galactic structure so vast and complex it made a mockery of our present level of understanding.

Your reaction to the article was informed by the deep scientific insights you’d acquired researching your book. But we were interrupted before I got a chance to tell you my reaction.

Which was this: hearing you speak, I suddenly understood a line in Hamlet that has puzzled me all my life. “Oh God,” Hamlet says. “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

I’d often imagined the “nut shell” was the brain. Look at a walnut shell and you’ll see why. But it only now occurred to me that the bad dreams suggest a mysterious quality of mind the brain can't account for. These are those same dreams that “may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.” They give us pause before we commit suicide, because “the Everlasting” has “fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.”

Your scientific reaction to the article was so exquisitely you, and my literary reaction to your reaction was so terribly me, that it illustrated the quality of life that goes missing when we write our conversations down. It is as Plato said it was: writing is a dead image of living knowledge. True knowledge is “brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark.” So it was when we spoke.

And yet…

…if Shakespeare had not written Hamlet’s words… if Plato had not written the words of Socrates… the dead image of knowledge would not have been in my mind to be kindled into new life by our conversation.

This is why church theology only matters if it ignites the living love of the holy spirit. It's why the experience of reading outstrips AI bullet points. Writing, the flesh made word, is mere kindling for contemplation and conversation, the word made flesh.

So we can hope our readers make these letters kindling for their conversations, and we can trust that, wherever two people converse with true intent, an invisible third party will supply the flame.

Love, Dad