Writing...it's magic

I watched the first hour or so of "Black Robe" on TV the other night. It's not a movie I can watch all the way through. Too bleak, too serious, too oppressive. But one scene really caught my eye and I haven't been able to get it out of my head.

After making camp along the river one evening, the priest is sitting on a rock, writing in his journal. A couple of his native guides come over to see what he's doing, but they don't understand when he tries to explain what writing is.

So he asks one of them to tell him something that he (the priest) and the other white men couldn't possibly know about. The man says that his woman's mother died in the snow the previous winter. Without saying a word, the priest writes this down in his book, closes it and gets up and walks to the other side of the camp.

There, he hands the book to one of his French compatriots and asks him to read aloud what he had just written down. When the man reads out about the woman dying in the snow, the natives who'd watched the priest write it down are stunned. It's like magic to them.

Wow.

Really. Wow.

Imagine being that Indian. Someone makes some funny markings on a page and it seems to magically transfer knowledge without a word being spoken. It must have seemed as astonishing as it would be to me if someone actually were able to send detailed messages to me via ESP.

Somehow that scene really brought home to me the power of the written word. The true innovation it was when it was first developed, starting out as just little scratches on a clay tablet to keep track of how many goats or cattle you had.

And now we not only transmit knowledge with the written word, we transmit emotions too. A skillful writer can have a reader laughing or crying or cringing at will. It's wonderful and beautiful and magical and not a sound is made except the turning of the pages.