Read Walking on Water for Free Online Page A

wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.
    In time of war language always dwindles, vocabulary is lost; and we live in a century of war. When I took my elder daughter’s tenth-grade vocabulary cards up to the school from which she had graduated, less than a decade after she had left, the present tenth-grade students knew almost none of them. It was far easier for my daughter to read Shakespeare in high school than it was for students coming along just a few years after her.
    This diminution is worldwide. In Japan, after the Second World War, so many written characters were lost that it is difficult, if not impossible, for the present-day college student to read the works of the great classical masters. In the USSR, even if Solzhenitsyn had been allowed to be read freely, it would not have been easy for the average student to read his novels, for again, after revolution and war, vocabulary fell away. In one of Solzhenitsyn’s books his hero spends hours at night reading the great Russian dictionary which came out in the late nineteenth century, and Solzhenitsyn himself draws on this work, and in his writing he is redeeming language, using the words of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, using the words of the people of the street, bringing language back to life as he writes.
    So it has always been. Dante, writing in exile when dukedoms and principalities were embroiled in wars, was forging language as he wrote his great science-fiction fantasies.
    We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually. Yet another reason why
Wrinkle
was so often rejected is that there are many words in it which would never be found on a controlled vocabulary list for the age-group of the ten-to-fourteen-year-old.
Tesseract,
for instance. It’s a real word, and one essential for the story.
    As a child, when I came across a word I didn’t know, I didn’t stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens. When I started to read Teilhard de Chardin’s
The Phenomenon of Man,
I was determined to understand it. I read intelligently, with a dictionary beside me, stopping to look up the scientific words which were not familiar to me. And I bogged down. So I put aside the dictionary and read as though I were reading a story, and quickly I got drawn into the book, fascinated by his loving theology, and understood it far better, at a deeper level, than if I had stuck with the dictionary.
    Is this contradiction? I don’t think so. We played with my daughter’s vocabulary words during dinner. We kept a dictionary by the table, just for fun. But when we read, we read. We were capable of absorbing far more vocabulary when we read straight on than when we stopped to look up every word. Sometimes I will jot down words to be looked up later. But we learn words in many ways, and much of my vocabulary has been absorbed by my subconscious mind, which then kindly blips it up to my conscious mind when it is needed.
    —
    We cannot Name or be Named without language. If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopworn words, we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles—we cannot think; we do not recognize danger; injustice strikes us as no more than “the way things are.”
    Some of the Ayia Napa delegates came from countries ruled by dictators, either from the right or the left. In both cases, teachers are suspect; writers are suspect because people who use words are able to work out complex ideas, to see injustice, and perhaps even to try to do something about it. Simply being able to read the Bible in their own language made some of the delegates suspect.
    I might even go to the extreme of declaring that the deliberate