Artesania: o ofício das palavras - Virginia Woolf | Prelúdios da fonte

[00:00:07][snorts] >> Words are full of echoes, memories, associations.

[00:00:22]They've been out on about, on people's lips, in our houses, in the streets, in the fields for so many centuries.

[00:00:30]And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing in today.

[00:00:34]They are stored with other meanings, with other memories.

[00:00:39]And they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word incarnadine, for example.

[00:00:47]Who can use that without remembering multitudinous seas?

[00:00:54]In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them.

[00:01:01]Nowadays, it's easy enough to invent new words. They just spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation.

[00:01:10]>> [music] >> But we cannot use them.

[00:01:12]You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious, yet always mysterious [music] fact that a word is not a single and separate entity. It is part of other words.

[00:01:26]Indeed, it is not a word until it is part of a sentence.

[00:01:30]Words belong to each other.

[00:01:32]>> [music] >> Although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word incarnadine belongs to multitudinous [music] seas.

[00:01:42]To combine new words with old words is faithful to the constitution [music] of a sentence.

[00:01:48]In order to use new words properly, you would have to invent a whole new language. And that, as I know doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business.

[00:01:58]Our business is to see what we can do with the language as it [music] is.

[00:02:05]How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive [music] and so that they create beauty so that they tell the truth?

[00:02:15]That [music] is the question.

[00:02:17]And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer.

[00:02:25]Think what it would mean if you could teach or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you pick up would tell [music] the truth or would create beauty.

[00:02:39]But there is some obstacle in [music] the way.

[00:02:43]Some hindrance to the teaching of words.

[00:02:46]For there at this moment at least 100 professors lecturing on literature of the past, at least 1,000 critics are reviewing the literature of the present. And hundreds [music] and hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in literature.

[00:03:01]Still, do we write better? Do we read better than we read and wrote 400 years ago where we were unlectured, >> [music] >> uncriticized, untaught?

[00:03:12]Well, where [music] are we to lay blame?

[00:03:15]Not on our professors, not on our reviewers, not on our writers, but on words.

[00:03:22]It is words that are to blame.

[00:03:23]>> [music] >> They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all.

[00:03:29]Of course, you can catch them and sort them, place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries.

[00:03:35]But words do not live in dictionaries.

[00:03:38]They live in the mind.

[00:03:40]If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion, when we most [music] need words, we find none.

[00:03:49]Yet there is dictionary.

[00:03:51]There at our disposal are [music] half million words all in alphabetical order.

[00:03:56]But can we use them?

[00:03:58]No, because words [music] do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.

[00:04:03]Look once more at the dictionary.

[00:04:05]There beyond the dark lie plays more splendid than Anthony and Cleopatra, [music] poems lovely on the ear or night in the air, novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude manglings of amateurs.

[00:04:18]Only a question of finding right words and putting them in the right order. We can't do it because they do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.

[00:04:27]And how do they live in the mind?

[00:04:30]Variously and strangely as much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, meeting together, though it's true they're much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are.

[00:04:39]Thus laying down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worthless and useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them is that they crouch at the edge of that deep, dark, and dimly fitfully illuminated cavern in [music] which they live, the mind. All we can say about them is they seem to like people to think before they use them and to feel before they use them. They're highly democratic, too.

[00:05:06]They believe that one word is as good as another. Uneducated words as good as educated words. There are no ranks or titles in their society. [music] For what is our nature to change?

[00:05:18]Perhaps [music] that is our most striking peculiarity, their need to change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided [music] and they convey it by being many-sided, dashing first this way, then that, thus saying one thing to one person, another thing to another person. [music] They're unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, [music] this power to mean in things to different people if they survive.

[00:05:51]>> [music] [music] [music] >> We pin them down to one meaning that you for meaning.

[00:06:12]>> [music] [music] [music]