A Delightful Evening

It began at dinner, where there were so few of us that we collected a table full of oddities. I found myself sitting across from my roommate (the Empress), and across from another friend, the Orator. To my right I had Saint Sarah, and on my left, one of Shakespeare's own favorites, the Watchman.

I suppose that it started innocently enough. The Watchman showed us his knife, and began to discourse, with many literary digressions, on the virtues of it as a status symbol. His arguments and general manner of address were worthy of Dogberry. The Orator and I exchanged many mirthful glances throughout, and Saint Sarah managed alone, of us all, not to smile.

We tripped our way through Lord of the Flies, made a few inevitable quotations from Much Ado About Nothing, and wound up somewhere in the middle century, for the Watchman began on Dickens. The Empress had not read such works of Dickens as were under discussion, but the Orator and I had. We came within an inch of our lives, too, for we were like to perish from laughing. If I tell you that he and I both put our heads down on the table and howled with merriment, you will understand, for it was at that point that the Watchman said, with absolute fervor in his every tone, "David Copperfield is a great book, I tell you. A great book! I have been shaped by that book. Think of it: that man--that vision--Uriah Heep!"

The Orator and I caught each other's eyes, and it was all up with us. Down went our heads; our shoulders shook; the Empress wanted to know what was so funny; we could not adequately explain, but only gasped out broken syllables about red eyes and how we thought that the Watchman was going to praise Copperfield... and to have Uriah Heep held up to us instead! It was too much; it was too delightful!

Well, that was dinner. I had begun my Sabbath already, and entreated the Orator to step down with me to my lobby, on account of the Empress having to write a paper, and Saint Sarah having one also. He did, to look at a few pages of Dickens which I happened to have. I brought lemon tea, and then began a conversation of the sort which is my delight, though I can only imperfectly summarize it here. It began with an analysis of thought patterns, mine and his. I brought out a poem and asked him what he thought of it. He called its images "good," but insisted that it was I who had a turn for poetics, and that he would prefer his ideas more simply expressed.

"You do not care for the meanings of words," I said. "You hear them well enough; you understand cadences. But you do not think of their meanings."

"A word," he countered, "is but a thing that all have agreed upon as expressing a particular idea."

"What!" I shot back, "and if I changed the words in the Bible, would not the meanings change as well? Are not certain words inextricably linked to certain meanings?"

"Not necessarily," he replied. "The idea, the concept behind a word, is immutable. But we could decide on a different word to express that idea. Words will perish, you know."

"Not so, my Lord," I answered, "where is it written that they will perish? Did not God speak the world into existence? Is Christ not called 'the Word'? Has the Trinity not been in communication with itself long before we were, and will it not continue long after we have ceased? Perhaps human language may cease; I could grant that."

He conceded it so, but pursued his point, that a word has no intrinsic meaning apart from the idea that all agree it signifies; that it is but a sign pointing to a thing signified after all. He spoke well, and I began to see his point. Yet I was reluctant still; the idea was not sufficiently disproven. Therefore I said, "what about the fact that, as one of my textbooks has it, each language now on earth uses for the concept of 'spirit' a word that also signifies 'breath,' specifically the breath of life?"

"Well?" He replied. "The idea of breath as connected with the idea of spirit does not change."

"So then, although both mean God, 'Eloi' and 'God' are two different signs, is that it? Two different words, both expressing the same idea, both agreed-upon signs in different times?" I asked.

He assented. I had begun by this point to see much in what he said, and acknowledged it. I pointed out that the trouble, I supposed, was in holding that two different ideas could be equally expressed by the same sign at the same time, as, for example, so often happens under the banner of Relative Truth. The Orator agreed that it was so. I mused a moment or two more, and then conceded the field.

"Does this mean that you acknowledge yourself to have been wrong?" He asked. "No," I replied, "for I was never firmly tied to that idea, but only held it up as a target to be shot at. It is abstract from me, and I have concluded that I agree with your darts better than with the paper target." I paused a moment, considered a little more, and finally said, "yes, I suppose that I was wrong."

Why did I say that? First of all, because I feared that it was only pride keeping me from admitting myself to be in the wrong. Secondly, and more tangentially, because I recognize that it is not good for anybody to adhere to nothing, to treat every idea as outside of themselves, to be loyal to no principle, to live by no absolute truth.

A delightful evening, all in all, and an instructive one.