The written word has a tremendous power in our minds to bring about poignant emotions, stir deep thoughts, and to stimulate weary imaginations (among other things). There have been times that language has overwhelmed me with its forceful intensity and has commandingly brought new and terribly splendid things to the fore of my mind with its surreal elegance. Yet the seemingly meta-like properties of language do not detach it from reality, for the truth is that language is all we really know.

But enough of that for now. I’ve been reading new things. Things written by those who were enslaved. The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriot A. Jacobs have begun to work their fervor on my soul. The inhuman darkness of slavery breaks through in a sickeningly beautiful way in their tragic narratives. Oh, the despair and loneliness, the corruption and deceit, the gross commodification of humanity made in God’s image–it is these things that emerge like a murderer in the night eager to to kill and take away that which is most precious: hope, and life.

I must return to my reading, perhaps, eventually, some passages will find their way here.