I think of how Eric Metaxas loves words, especially slightly unfamiliar ones, and I feel similarly. It seems an odd thing, to like words! You can’t touch them and you can’t eat or drink them. You can’t store them in a vault and hope they appreciate in value. But I take comfort that it’s part of the ever quirky human condition.
People have loved words since before they were written down; Homer spoke poetically some 5,000 years ago. God made us this way, or at least some of us. The philosopher Rene Girard would say that all loves are give to us from others - if everyone valued ankles, ankles would become the body part most associated with sexual desire - so essentially it was probably a few authors in a few books in youth who transfused this affection in me.
Partially though I think it’s a particular brand of writing that appeals - depictions of nature and of the senses. Words are thus a conduit to relive actual experiences. The description of the beauty of trees or ocean merely triggers the feelings that I have in an actual forest or sea and so is derivative. Nearly everyone is in love with some form of nature, be it the sea or sun or moon or mountain. This is surely bred in us as well. Only humans create art and the cave dwellers 20,000 years ago drew - what else? - God’s creation. It’s a way of extending the pleasure of scenery even when you aren’t in front of it.
A couple examples from the Charlie Smith novel I’m reading:
She lay down on the yellowed sisal rug in the living room and listened to the little house geckos chirping like docents...Arise, she said silently, the Redeemer has come, and stopped in the kitchen—that still held its faded bundle of afternoon light like a sheaf of yellow seagrass in its arms...
Stars everywhere like bristly bits tossed aside, crumbs.
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