2. Madness, Murder, and the Making of Dictionaries

Dear Rick,

So here is my plan: I am going to work on a personality/person exchange with Simon Winchester. I still have to clear it with him, of course. But I think it will work out in the end. Because you are delightful – so I know he will agree – and because he is delightful. Win. Win. Win.

Maybe not? you think. Oh, alright. –

So I’ve learned other things too. That is, other than the fact that Simon Winchester writes exactly the sort of books that I would if I 1) were more clever and less lazy, and 2) had a small army of research assistants:

The meaning of monomaniacal, and that it’s just the sort of quality that fuels acts of mad greatness. The kind of greatness that devises a task like compiling a history of every single word in the English language, for example, and confidently asserts it can be done in a number of years countable by hands. (It actually took, by the way, seventy years. Which still amazes me.)

Lexicography should be left to those with truly Napoleonic strains of grandeur and vision. You may not know it, but becoming a lexicographer is something I’ve held out for. You know, not in actual or tangible way, but more as a daydream. It's the same sort of vague, wishful desire that makes me say: I will become an accordion player. I have also, on occasion, heaved a sigh, and thought: I will become the next Bryan Garner. Yes, well...as of now, that (dream of a) dream is over. Do you know the reading involved? The time? The detail intensity?! And to the lexicographers out there? I send more than just a tip of my hat in your glorious, monomaniacal direction.

Hooks sink me. So, this starting out of each chapter with a definition – one that provides a symbolic flourish to the pages that follow – bravo! Mr. Winchester; I was smitten from the start.

Your wife is a big, fat history geek. (Is it suddenly more official now that I’ve said it online?) Oh, it’s true. When it comes to entertainment, I would now gladly gulp down a well-written history in place of fiction. Because real life is the best fodder for soap opera. Don’t believe me? I have one word for you: autopeotomy.

Kindly overlooking the point of origin makes me morally lazy. There is an ethical light switch I flip when I think about history, one that allows me to overlook or overly contextualize the very great sins of very great men. One that accepts the good that has managed to grow, somehow, from the bad; so it also, consequently, accepts the bad as, if not negligible, then permissible. Whereas, in the present tense, I am not nearly so permissive. So, here’s the deal: the mad man shot someone. Which, maybe doesn’t sound like much right now, but he shot someone in a dingy neighborhood of London back in a time when shooting someone was an extraordinary thing that (almost) never happened. And I can say what I want about atonement and confinement, but here’s the rub (one you’ve proven so good at not letting me forget): our dear, inspired mad man was also a murderer. There were extenuating circumstances out the wazoo, yes. But Mr. Winchester does not let us forget that an innocent man died. An innocent man who was on his way to work in the factory in the wee hours of the morning. An innocent man who was covering a shift for a co-worker. An innocent man with a wife, six kids to feed, and another on the way. And the loss of this life is a big deal, not an unfortunate precursor to a grand storyline.

While I’m on this thread, let me say: there is something about cruelty that makes history more real to me. Though I rail against this glossing over of history, like people were somehow more innocent, more honest and pure decades or centuries ago, I fall victim to the urge myself. Until, that is, I read about the little acts of cruelty that people have committed against each other throughout time. Now, it’s not that Mr. Winchester dabbles in the overly or unnecessarily gory, but he does give just enough. Just enough to have ignited my own empathetic pain receptors and make it all just that touch more real.

Does that make any sense? Do I sound like I’m hungrily searching through the mire at the bottom of history’s barrel? Like I’m taking too much delight in what should be gladly cast aside? Hopefully no. Because what I think I’m getting at is that I have an overly active imagination when it comes to anything that results in physical pain. And when I read those bits, like the account of branding deserters during the Civil War, I feel such an empathetic pain in my own skin, my own cheek, that it confirms for me, somehow, that the people I’m reading about were undeniably real. That things like this actually happened. (How could they not? They’re almost too terrible for people to have made up out of thin air.) And that, as a corollary, life is universally life: dirty, small and marked by this physicality we have (that is both inescapable and fleeting), but punctuated by moments of clarity, beauty and transcendental greatness. And that we, as creatures, are feeble or extraordinary enough to mostly focus on the latter.

(And as much as I hate to leave things on a chord of optimistic grandiosity, there we go. That's all I've got.)

I love you,
Erin