Free Lost Words by Nicola Gardini Page B

manner
—like a mother who says she’s only your mother but later turns out to be the mother of many other children, and as a matter of fact, the meaning wasn’t a meaning at all. It was a
word
. Meaning, by itself, doesn’t exist! A word is a meaning that comes into contact with people and assumes a variety of appearances. Everyone sees a little of themselves in it, everyone understands what they can or what they want to understand.
Bello, ma . . .!
A mother can be the mother of many children, even if each of them will say that she’s his or her mother … I know—it’s a bad fairy tale … One day I realized that I was the hero of this fairy tale. Yet there are people who have a lifelong belief in the absolutely perfect correspondence between words and meanings.
Lucky them!
—I don’t, I’m sorry—some writers are that way, whether they express themselves in prose or poetry. In Italy, Pascoli, Gadda, and Landolfi are
writers of meanings
. For them, the word serves to indicate a precise meaning, and is indeed the meaning itself, which by itself is indescribable, undefinable. If you seek to define it you end up destroying it, as Shelley said about the rose, which, ‘if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed.’
Writers of words
are of a different breed: they think in
sentences
. The meaning stems from the sum of the words, the relations that words establish with each other: taken individually they say very little, because they need the others to signify. For other writers—Woolf, Stendhal, T.E. Lawrence—the meaning emerges from the chain of relations between words, from the discourse, and these writers, unlike the others, require a listener. They require answers. For the first type, the meanings themselves are answers! Every word, for writers of words, has meaning because it is connected to another word—and not to just any word. Every word has a predisposition to sympathize with one word rather than another. Every word has its own destiny, which is fulfilled in the sentence. And a word doesn’t function only in the construct of the sentence. It also functions in relationship to certain hidden words that are not written down, invisible words like ghosts, impalpable but as present as shadows: words that have already been written by someone else and now are evoked by the words that we put down on paper. There are sentences, chains of words that ripple beneath the surface of the page and descend into remote depths where our conscience is unable to plunge, even in moments of great acuity. The
writers of words
are actually readers. The writers of meanings are more similar to scientists, anatomists, or botanists. They catalog. The others collect and forget to classify their findings, because they prefer to scatter around the house whatever they come up with, even at the risk of losing something—what an enviable freedom!
If only I . . .
”
    After a long pause, she related that when she was young, when she lived in India, she had compiled a dictionary of the English language. She revealed this to me almost accidentally, without dramatizing this extraordinary confession, as if it had escaped her. I begged her to tell me more.
    â€œThe children of the village needed a study aid . . .” she started to explain, shrugging her shoulders, “as well as a few
ideas
. . .” When she uttered the word “ideas,” she suddenly came alive. “Writing a dictionary even for the ordinary purposes I had assigned myself was an immense enterprise!” she said, jumping to her feet. “A most wonderful enterprise! You have the eyes of the past and the future upon you . . . I was obviously not the first person to try my hand at one: over the centuries other individuals—not that many, in the end—tried to gather all the words in a book, with only the help of a copyist . . .” She approached the