I think that the man from the moon would know France without knowing French; I think that he would know England without having heard the word. For in the last resort all men talk by signs. To talk by statues is to talk by signs; to talk by cities is to talk by signs. Pillars, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pyramids, are an enormous dumb alphabet: as if some giant held up his fingers of stone. The most important things at the last are always said by signs, even if, like the Cross on St. Paul’s, they are signs in heaven. If men do not understand signs, they will never understand words.
G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered
There’s a wealth in just that paragraph—in just the final sentence. And thinking back on the words of Latin teacher Jason Barney (words I shared here and here)…well, they make me think that we’re not even teaching people how to read these signs any more. The signs no longer mean, or are no longer allowed to mean, what the sign-maker (or artist, or architect, or builder) meant them to; they’re all things to all people, subject to our interpretation of them , and if this is in direct contradiction to the originator’s intent, well, that’s just too bad, or he was simply unaware of what he was really saying. Isn’t relativism delightful?
Of course, that’s what I’m reading about in Roger Kimball’s Rape Of The Masters, too, though I’ve long known this was happening. As an observer and a photographer, I’m deeply interested in and concerned by this takeover of cultural ‘signs’ by the so-called intelligentsia.
Signs and symbols, meaning anything and everything, really come to mean nothing at all.
Really, if we ourselves and our culture don’t get over ourselves in a hurry, we’re in very big trouble.
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