Power of Language to Transform and Redeem

Excerpts from a write up by Maria Popova: Ursula K. Le Guin on 'The Power of Language to Transform and Redeem'

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” - Emerson

Hardly anything does this for us more powerfully than art — it unsettles us awake, disrupts our deadening routines, enlarges our reservoir of hope by enlarging our perspective, our grasp of truth, our capacity for beauty.

This singular function of art is what Ursula reflects on

"The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said.

The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.

The paradox, of course, is that words are both our instrument of truth and our weapon of distortion. We use them both to reveal and to conceal 

As a writer, you want the language to be genuinely significant and mean exactly what it says. That’s why the language of politicians, which is empty of everything but rather brutal signals, is something a writer has to get as far away from as possible. If you believe that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

We can’t restructure our society without restructuring the English language. One reflects the other. 

What literature does, Le Guin points out, is enlarge our understanding of our own experience by enriching its container in language:

There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It’s one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel.’