This essay was written by Aiden Jones, a BYU Humanities Center student fellow.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been able to use words to communicate as well as Helen Burns, whose “soul sat on her lips, and language flowed” as she spoke to her friend Jane Eyre. [1]
Today, language, like almost everything else in the postpostmodern/digital/AI world, is a product. It’s one that some people manipulate, others sell; foolish English students like me even pay to study it. Language has been commodified—we are trained to it use as foothold for climbing to the top of the zero-sum market economy—and that adversely affects the way we speak, write, and think. Many of us are appalled at how AI builds essays and poems out of pre-existing phrases like it’s snapping LEGOs together, but it learned that trick from us; have you heard these?
– “As a whole”
– “Hauntingly beautiful”
– “Deeper meaning”
Some of our modern phrases are useful in that they allow us to communicate efficiently. But now we’ve mass-produced language to the point that it seems everything has been written or said, and Borges’ now-realized Library of Babel taunts us with its finite-infinity. [2] As Orwell writes in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” “English is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” [3] I think Justin Bieber puts it better, though, when he asks in his ballad of the same name: “what do you mean?” [4]
By now I think I have identified my problem: chasms separate words and their meanings, and these chasms often deepen as we attempt to communicate with each other. So, this narrative traces my relationship with the meaning of one word, a meaning I have obsessed over, in the hope that you might understand my understanding, shrinking the chasm at least for this one definition. (I should note—you can probably find lots of word-LEGO-pieces in this essay, unfortunately, but that’s not my point, or maybe it is? Writing about the limits of language using language is a torturous paradox.)
I find many definitions of words slippery but deserve is especially hard. First, because I spent so many years of my life feeling that all I deserved was Hell. I have OCD, which used to really distort the way I understood the world. I’ve had thorough treatment that helped me immensely, but even erasing the conception that I deserved to burn eternally did not tell me what it was I did deserve. I had to rethink many parts of my faith during the years I practiced exposure therapy with my therapist, but figuring out what I deserved—and why—was one part I just could not crack. If I was a daughter of God, I knew my worth was “great in the sight of God,” [5] but did that mean I deserved anything at all?
I was relieved when I found an answer in Mosiah 4, where King Benjamin tells his people:
As ye have come to the knowledge of the glory of God, or if ye have known of his goodness and have tasted of his love… even so I would that ye should remember, and always retain in remembrance, the greatness of God, and your own nothingness, and his goodness and long-suffering towards you, unworthy creatures, and humble yourselves even in the depths of humility. [6]
It’s a bit of an intense verse, I know; “your own nothingness…unworthy creatures”? Yikes! How are you supposed to feel after that? According to the speaker, joyful. The chapter focuses on this duality of knowing that you are nothing and yet feeling loved through the illogical, unexplainable redemption of Jesus Christ. But what I learned was that I was nothing, and that meant I deserved nothing. I decided that the definitive definition of the word stemmed from these truths in Mosiah.
From that time on, deserve carried a massive weight in my dictionary because I had so deeply thought about and worried about what I deserved. But I could tell by the way other people threw the word into their sentences that, for them, it was only trite language, the means to an end of a conversation rather than a container of meaning. I became annoyed when someone carelessly threw the platitude: “you deserve it” or “they deserve the world.” These comments can still itch me like a bug-bite I want to scratch raw. When I heard them, at first, I’d usually factor in social cues and stay quiet; I didn’t start an argument about semantics every time I heard deserve. I would narrow my eyes a bit, unintentionally, and begin wondering what it was the person really meant by such imprecise language. And I would start a conversation about deserve when talking to someone I respected and knew well, when we had the time to discuss, or if I was feeling more obstinate than usual.
Even with these qualifiers, I have not successfully avoided conversations about my charged relationship with deserve. In fact, I have had what’s felt like the same talk over and over and over again. And it’s usually with someone I’m going out with (I’m really fun on dates!). I usually find the conversation frustrating. Not because they disagree, but because I feel like they don’t quite understand why I struggle with the word and its meaning. It’s not that I hate myself so I think I don’t deserve anything; it’s that I “cannot say that [I am] even as much as the dust of the earth” [7] next to God—so I don’t deserve anything. Because my definition was based in scripture, it was so clear to me that the word carried a more profound and serious meaning than colloquially accepted. With each conversation, I became more determined to never budge from my newfound truth.
Then, in January, I visited a friend in London on my way to my internship in northern England. The icy rain that attacked whenever we stepped outside left us spending most of our time in museums and pubs. At one pub in Pimlico, fueled by Diet Coke (with ice and a lime slice), we talked about our lives when he stumbled into my trap: the word. We were talking about our futures, as one does in the last years of university, and he said something along the lines of “you deserve a career in _______.”
Ha! I was giddy.
“I don’t think anyone deserves anything” I said with my nose in the air, starting the battle with unabashed hubris. The conversation that followed my statement felt like a ping pong match, our words thrown with hasty precision, hurrying to find some truth. For the first half an hour, I remained sure of my definition’s infallibility. But then my friend differentiated deserving from earning.
“Deserve is passive; earn is active.” He was resolute. And I sat against the back of my chair, puzzled.
So, I’ve thought about this conversation since January, and I haven’t come to a satisfying conclusion. But my story is not over in London or Grasmere; I end my narrative in Milan.
About a month ago, I visited the Pinacoteca di Brera. I found it after searching “art museum” on my phone’s map and picked it since it appeared close to the train station I needed to be at by 14:00. After stumbling through the ticket-purchasing, I strolled down a long corridor of marble busts and tiny text towards the galleries. I go to museums a lot, but I’m always still shocked by them, overwhelmed by the decadence of gold frame after gold frame, Caravaggio next to Veronese. In this particular instance, I tried to alleviate my stunned state by walking through each gallery in the first half of the museum twice—some three times.
As I ended that section of my visit (14:00 unmercifully approached), I internally lamented:
These pieces deserve hours of my study and looking and attention, but I’ll never be able to give it to them all.
I walked into the last leg of galleries, still mourning. Oh. I stopped. (The woman behind me had to step out of the way to avoid running into me. But I didn’t care to return her glare; she did not understand the gravity of what had just happened.) I had used the word deserve! And I really meant it, really believed that all of those paintings and sculptures deserved my attention just by existing, had not earned my respect, but came to it passively. My stubborn definition shattered and I heard my friend: “deserve is passive; earn is active.” Again, I was thrown into the uncomfortable, exhausting world of elastic language, of uncertain meaning.
I still believe that saying “you deserve the world” is a heinous “ready-made” phrase that we should, like all other LEGO phrases, avoid the “familiar dreary patterns” of [3], so we don’t lose our ability to communicate authentically. But also, I know that those paintings deserved more attention than I or anyone in the Pinacoteca had the time or patience to give them. And deserve is the only word I can use to explain that feeling. So here is what I leave you with, reader. No resolution, just my wrestle: a desire to strike manufactured, interchangeable-parts language with lush precision and the increasing anxiety that I don’t understand what any word means at all.
This winding narrative about my relationship with the word deserve, so unhelpfully punctuated by a question mark, is probably confusing and takes too long to read. But my absurd act of trying to put the inexplainable into words at all defies a world where we give in to ready-made phrases out of the ease of shallow connection, a world where “she would never know him. He would never know her” [8], and none of us ever know each other. Like Orwell, I refuse to give up on the English language. When Jane Eyre saw Helen’s soul on her lips, she saw Helen; I hope that through my imperfect and often imprecise writing about my odd obsession with the limits of language and the word deserve, you’ve come to understand and see a part of my soul, too.
While language can imprison us on islands of our own experience, if we leave our islands to row in the salty sea of semantics, we will be closer to finding each other. We can begin to understand each other in our personally unique Englishes. And that is worth the trouble.
References:
[1] Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847.
[2] Borges, Jorge Luis. “Libaray of Babel.” 1941.
[3] Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” 1946.
[4] Bieber, Justin. “What do you Mean?” 2015.
[5] Doctrine and Covenants 18:10
[6] Mosiah 4:11
[7] Mosiah 2:25
[8] Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927.
