I am grateful to a dear friend, Graham Shutt, for forwarding me a passage from the writer Iris Murdoch, whose words might help us remember why we write, and why we expend so much of our efforts as teachers of reading and writing:
“Plato says (Phaedrus, Letter VIII) that no sensible man will commit his thought to words and that a man’s thoughts are likely to be better than his writings. Without raising philosophical problems about what a man’s thoughts are, one may reply that the discipline of committing oneself to clari fied public form is proper and rewarding: the final and best discoveries are often made in the actual formulation of the statement. The careful responsible skilful use of words is our highest instrument of thought and one of our highest modes of being: an idea which might seem obvious but is not now by any means universally accepted. There may in theoretical studies, as in art, be so-called ultra-verbal insights at any level; but to call ultimate truth
inef fable is to utter a quasi-religious principle which should not be turned round against the careful verbalisation of humbler truths.”
from Iris Murdoch, “The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Peter Conradi. New York: Penguin, 1997. 386.
