This is the new Letters Editor breaking a promise of a lifetime not to write a letter to the editor. Except I’m not really writing to the editor (that would be selfindulgence); I’m writing to you, the readers. Ever since I stopped being a fundamentalist, I’ve had problems with the written as opposed to the spoken word. Spoken words are obviously only temporary and are relatively easy to back track on. Hopefully they are as true as possible at the time they are spoken. And face to face with a listener there is always a chance of clarification and modification. But record them and they are exposed to a greater risk of being universalised, misappropriated, misunderstood, misrepresented. Worst of all they are incredibly difficult to obliterate. However, maybe, letters to the editor are as near to the spoken word as is possible in an uninhibited network like ours where ideas come thick and fast and need to be shared from the grass roots up. And with lots of them, it would be a bit like having a conversation.
So let’s be having you!
I recently happened to see The Da Vinci Code on the library shelves (said he, excusing himself for reading it!) and was struck by one sentence. The character Langdon says, ‘Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith – acceptance of that which we imagine to be true; that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory and exaggeration. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors’.
I felt this a useful sentence and wonder whether others might feel the same.