Good words and a solid chair
There's joy in the play of language and the right kind of lengthy discourse.
One of centenarian poet Stanley Kunitz's favorite books, reports the Writer’s Almanac,
was the dictionary. He said: "I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria — some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly my thought in the beginning was that there was so much joy playing with language that I couldn't consider living without it."
My friend Ed has a Morris chair, in which he too has encountered a great many good words and from which he has articulated in my virtual presence the residue of a large and varied experience of nearly eight decades. (His isn’t green like Stanley’s, but it sure looks cozy.)
Ed is not a poet, so far as I know, but he appreciates William James’s observation that “Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse.” We’ve been meeting up on Zoom just about every Friday for years now, to exchange and ponder words and their objects. If time and circumstance (and in the Jamesian spirit, volition) permit, we’ll eventually distill our lengthy discourse into something we’ll want to share with anyone who may be interested.
But whether that happens, and whether or not anyone at all is ever interested, those Fridays have been their own reward. There is, as the poet said, much joy in playing with language. And evidently there is much inspiration in the right well-crafted chair.