Writing and reading are mysterious activities. They enable some people to continue speaking way after death. Sure, recording voices is, in a way, a modern form of this, but I think the fact sound enters the brain through the ears rather than the eyes affects how our brains will process the information.
In some ways listening to another’s voice is easier because there are so many ways the pitch and timber of sound can be modulated that are not possible (or at least as easy) to do with words on a page; or even more challenging, symbols carved into stone.
On the other hand, listening in some ways is more difficult compared to reading unless you have the ability to rewind and re-listen.
Here is my real point.
Reading is becoming, it seems to me, a lost art. For example, if you want to communicate with the masses today in social media, experts will advise you to videotape. People today gravitate to picture and sound over information in print. This makes sense if anyone falls for the idea they lack the time to slow down to read and reflect. There is an irony here. Reading information is faster than watching and listening if someone is truly in a hurry.
On the other hand, and I have written about this before, I am not a speed reader. I would prefer to read a little slower in order to absorb more in the first pass. Perhaps this has to do with the voices in my head. You see, as I read I respond mentally. I find myself agreeing or disagreeing or asking questions or answering some old questions from something I read earlier. . . which ties nicely into a quote from Chesterton.
A man’s soul is as full of voices as a forest; there are ten thousand tongues there like all the tongues of the trees: fancies, follies, memories, madnesses, mysterious fears, and more mysterious hopes. All the settlement and sane government of life consists in coming to the conclusion that some of those voices have authority and others not.
G K Chesterton A Passage from a Miscellany of Men (1912)
So, as I read this passage, I asked myself the above question. “Who writes like this? Who gives tongues to all the trees?”
A wordsmith like this provides for me an opportunity to see life from a different perspective; to see trees swaying in the breeze and the sound of their leaves rustling, and to wonder if, in a way, from some elevated angle, the pitching of a forest in the wind looks like tongues? Or perhaps these are like the tongues of the Spirit descending at Pentecost. All I do know is that some writers have a gift of stimulating my imagination and I am the better for it.
Finally, last point. This sort of experience is reserved to the quiet reader of prose and poetry, not generally experienced by a large audience or classroom. Discernment, as Chesterton states, is differentiating between the voices in our own heads in order to listen solely to the one that truly matters. Nothing speedy about any of this in my experience.
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it!
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the LORD, for he comes, for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness, and the peoples in his faithfulness.
Psalms 96:11-13 (ESV)
Who writes like this?