Features | November 21, 2024

On Writing: Why It Matters, Why It’s So Difficult, and What, If Anything, Can Help 

Andrew Mulvania 

“We asked to be obsessed with writing,  

and we were.” 

— from “For John Berryman” by Robert Lowell 

In the preface to his recent book on writing, which bears the lofty and ambitious title Why Writing Matters, Nicholas Delbanco makes clear why writing (and, by association, reading) has so often been connected with notions of learning, sophistication, and culture. Civilization, as we are accustomed to thinking of it, arose hand in hand with the development of language, so it’s natural that the two would be inextricably connected. Delbanco’s summary of their near-simultaneous development contains the seeds of answers to questions that all the works reviewed here wrestle with—that is, why writing matters now, and why it is still such a difficult thing to do well: 

Writing is the junior sibling—the great-great-grandchild, even—of speech. Shouts and screams came first. Unnumbered eons passed before the sounds that men and women make became a sound transcribed. A murmur or a growl or pointed finger or chest-thump sufficed to beguile an intimate or to warn an enemy. Only long years later did the words I love you, or Keep your distance, stranger, take shape as articulate speech. And all of this was fleeting: before the invention of writing, spoken discourse could not last. For African griots or the Rig Veda or the epic poems of Homer, the mode of transmission was oral and subject to forgetfulness or change. We have no way of knowing how much of the language is lost. 

This abbreviated account of the development of spoken and written language conjures images of torchlight on cave walls, blood spatters from a slain wooly mammoth, and a primitive system of grunts and whistles that function as the nonverbal equivalent of that famous opening courtship gambit, “Me, Tarzan; you, Jane.” At the same time, it serves to illustrate just how central language was to the rapid development and expansion of human civilization: if we hadn’t, evolutionarily, “lucked into language” and, specifically, writing, none of the life that surrounds us now would be here in its present form.