As a first assignment in an introductory class I was teaching at a big Midwestern university in the early 2000s, I asked the students to describe their relationship with language. Just a page, I told them, and gave no other instructions, anxious to see what these undergrads, my first students, could tell me about the medium I was about to devote my life to. One freshman wrote about growing up in a family of avid readers. They loved language, he wrote, and so he assumed he would always love language too. But at some point during high school, for reasons he didn’t explain, he realized words had deceived him. And now, he continued, he was learning to love language despite its deceit.

That line about loving language despite its deceit struck me at the time and has stayed with me. I had also grown up in a family that loved language, and I assumed I’d always love language too. The written word had imaginatively transported me, a girl of limited means from a small New England town, great distances, connecting me with people I would never know or meet in far-flung places across the world and across the span of centuries. It was language that landed me in the Midwest, where I enrolled in an MFA program in poetry and where I entered a more immediate, embedded, and social experience of language. And it was books that led me out of that place, becoming my bread and butter as I built and sustained a career in publishing that has now stretched over two and a half decades.

In between my childhood experiences of language as transport, and the adult rectitude in which language was a living, was that intermediary time when language felt most alive. That was when, as John Ashbery put it, “all things seem mention of themselves.” Perhaps it was the Midwest’s flat backdrop, the industrial agriculture that surrounded that small city, both verdant and somehow foreclosed, that allowed a very verbal spirit to move through that town, blowing breath into words. Words blossomed at the centre of everything the other students and I did together. We attended poetry readings at bookstores, walked over bronze panels with literary dialogue set into pavement, and threw William Blake–themed dinner parties. Surrounded by managed land, language’s more unruly undersprings were in us, insisting on generation. For each dead end of language I’d observe, each recognition of its hard limits, there seemed to be innumerable ways for us to return language to life. If the words on the page were immobile and mute, like Ezekiel’s dry bones in the valley, we could breathe new life into them because we spoke them to each other and to that time and place.

In our workshops, we studied the techniques behind the movement on the page. Rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, enjambment, and the sequencing of lines created a sonic structure into which any reader could enter. To recite a poem, to memorize it, or to whisper it internally to oneself was to come close to the pulse and breath, the feeling—the magic, even—of someone else’s experience. That drawing close to the physical reality of another human being made the world feel wider and more fluid. I was enamoured of the poems I read in that town, surrounded by people who loved those poems too, and I believed that together we were cutting close to the quick of life.

How idyllic that all seems now!

The next twenty years would school me in the deceptions language is capable of, the ways language can be used to divide, deaden, and hollow out human life rather than animate or sacralize it. Language, I would learn, could be a tool that mines our bodies and injures our souls, distancing us from each other, the world, and God. Windless, spiritless, inanimate—such language forecloses human communication rather than acts as a vehicle for it.

As Thomas Merton observed in the 1960s, language can incubate a hatred for life rather than a love of life, and it can as easily fall victim to war, genocide, and tyranny as people can. In his essay “Auschwitz: A Family Camp,” he wrote that language can encircle “reality as a doughnut encircles its hole,” buffering us from our experience rather than deepening our relationship with it.

As a Trappist monk, Merton had spent countless hours in silent prayer, an experience that seems to have sharpened his perception of words. He was also a poet, and poets, he argued, were most sensitive to what he called the “sickness of language”—a sickness whose symptoms in his era included race riots and assassinations. As he argued in “War and the Crisis of Language,” written in the context of the Vietnam War, it was poets who could tell when language had crossed over into “anti-language, a concrete expression of something that is uttered in fire and bullets rather than in words.” Sick language, he believed, is full of “double-talk, tautology, ambiguous cliché, self-righteous and doctrinaire pomposity, and pseudoscientific jargon that mask a total callousness and moral insensitivity, indeed a basic contempt for man.”

In the two decades that have elapsed since I left those Midwestern farmhouses, bookstores, and poetry readings, I’ve confronted language’s more deceitful, lifeless, and anti-human capacities. The lies about weapons of mass destruction; a war on terror that claimed the lives of an estimated four to five million people worldwide, directly and indirectly—lives that I rarely heard mentioned; the destructive onslaught of social media companies; the “fake news” about “fake news”; the online disputes between billionaires; the cancelled talks, banned books, and lists of words you cannot use; and now this frenzied new era of large language models that draw on human-generated text to create artificial-intelligence tools that are predicted to put people out of work, rewire our brains, and take over the labour of writing.

The news is now full of stories about people marrying their chatbots, or about teens following ChatGPT’s instructions as they set up nooses to hang themselves. Students are arriving on college campuses with diminishing abilities—and desires—to read and write. Last year I witnessed my own daughter staring into a blank computer screen, trying to write a paper on George Orwell’s 1984, a novel about a totalitarian surveillance society and the corrupted language that’s used to sustain it. She sat at her desk for hours, lit by an electric blue halo, incapable of generating words to describe Orwell’s fictional depiction of a political party whose slogan was “War Is Peace” and whose “Ministry of Truth” spat out lies. She felt exhausted, she told me, and she really wasn’t sure what she should say.

It’s winter now, and after twelve or so hours each day with the written word, I drive my car through the back roads of my small town, looking into fields and under stars for the animals that emerge at night: deer, foxes, coyotes. They prowl the woods that surround these salted streets, streets I have known and loved since I was a kid, and the places where I first discovered speech. I look for their wordless movements in the dark, imagining a more naked existence. In the morning, walking through those same streets, I find the marks they’ve left on land: footprints, excrement, and teeth marks—letters of an immediate language.

The silence takes me in, and in it I breathe more freely than I do in sentences these days. The apophatic pulls, some absence sings, and I hear an Arctic wind through the trees. Something seems very alive in that silence in 2026—deep, fallow, and fertile. Silence is the understory below language’s dominance; it is “God’s first language,” as another Trappist monk, Father Thomas Keating, puts it; “everything else is a poor translation.” Outside, on those walks and drives, alive to the landscape around me, allowing that wordlessness to take me in, words resume their natural dialogue with silence, animals, darkness, and light. Through those intimate exchanges, I can feel them stir again, itching toward meaning, beginning a mysterious and innate process of repair. And here, in the dead of winter and in the ripe despair of our information era, I find myself, like my student, learning to love language despite its deceit.

I’m often tempted to blame technology for language’s descent into propaganda in the internet age, but as I’ve watched the desecration of language by language (or through language), I’ve had to wrestle with a harder reality for a former poet to face: that language itself is a technology, that it has long been the handmaiden of anti-human forces, and that it can narrow our habits of perception, blinding us to each other, reality, and God just as easily as it can connect us.

In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, anthropologist David W. Anthony describes how our language is full of fossils, the histories of the generations who have spoken it. The Indo-European languages carry the history of their successful transmissions made possible through military conquest. The languages we speak now are those of the victors, and they bear within them the tools and perspectives that made mass slaughter and domination possible.

The Indo-European languages, Anthony argues, have their origins in the steppe lands north of the Black and Caspian Seas, somewhere near where the Russia-Ukraine War is now being fought. He reconstructs how “the oldest well-documented Indo-European languages—Imperial Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, and the most ancient form of Sanskrit, or Old Indic—were spoken by militaristic societies that seemed to erupt into the ancient world driving chariots pulled by swift horses.” The chariot, a technology made possible by the invention of the wheel, was as much a weapon as a vehicle. Together with the domestication of horses, the chariot allowed this linguistic community to rapidly spread and conquer new lands.

As the Indo-European linguistic community spread, other language families went extinct. This loss of linguistic diversity could, Anthony suggests, have “narrowed and channeled habits of perception in the modern world.” Other ways of seeing the world and understanding our place within it were lost as those other languages and peoples were lost. Anthony observes that some languages, like Hopi, require the speaker to frame any description of reality in terms that attest to the reliability of their source for that information. This is not required by the Indo-European languages whose grammars, in turn, have their own idiosyncrasies. These grammars force speakers to specify when a given action took place and whether the actor was singular or plural, reflecting a particular, not universal, understanding of the relationship between humans, action, and time.

In his classic 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, philosopher (and magician!) David Abram explores the ways of sensing and knowing that were lost as humans increasingly relied on language—especially written language—to inhabit and interpret their worlds. He observes in our era a “strange inability to clearly perceive other animals—a real inability to clearly see, or focus upon, anything outside the realm of human technology, or to hear as meaningful anything other than human speech.” There is naturally an “improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits,” he writes, but our attention has become focused on the conversations we have between ourselves—or even with ourselves. We humans are losing our “ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth”—the “wild and multiplicitous otherness . . . in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself.”

This wild, multiplicitous otherness is found in the embodied relationship between breath and language. To speak, we must breathe, and to breathe is to take in what is not self, what has been exhaled by plants, animals, or other people. Abram writes, “It is by virtue of this continual breath that nature is always new; the world around us is a continual, ongoing utterance. Thus, the activity of speech, like breathing, links humans not just to God but to all that surrounds us, from the stones to the sparrows.”

Language, he argues, “is not an inert or static structure, but an evolving bodily field. It is like a vast, living fabric continually being woven by those who speak.” But with the introduction of writing, language moved from the immediacy of the body into the abstract realm of representation. Particularly after the phonetic alphabet replaced pictographic characters or ideograms, linguistic tools that still somehow resembled what they represented, a chasm opened up between the fullness of reality and the capacity of language to convey that fullness. The larger, non-human world lingers only in traces within the new scripts; they are “no longer necessary participants in the transfer of linguistic knowledge,” and the “other animals, the plants, and the natural elements—sun, moon, stars, waves—are beginning to lose their own voices.” The air we now breathe, in our text-dominated age, is still full of life, but if we consciously perceive that air at all, we experience it as thin, empty. Writing made language breathless, windless, and static. Text drained words of their sacred powers.

In her 1986 essay “Text, Silence, Performance,” American novelist Ursula Le Guin mourns the loss of the oral traditions she believes should exist alongside our written traditions. The move to writing from speaking entailed losses. “Writing of any kind,” she writes, “fixes the word outside time, and silences it. The written word is a shadow. Shadows are silent.” As writing became a tool of the powerful, a sign of an advanced civilization, the oral became disreputable, inferior to the written word. By the late twentieth century, written language was increasingly not produced by hand but printed by machines, furthering the distance between bodies and language. “We value the power of print,” she writes, “which is its infinite reproducibility. Print is viral. (Virile is now subsumed in viral.) The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.” Print was language that had found a “short circuit, a way around the body.” Writing decades before the emergence of tweets, Le Guin, a science fiction writer who pushed against the bounds of literary realism, seemed to foresee the virile, virtual, and viral playground that language was soon to become. She intuited how endless reproductions would soon crowd out more organic forms of life, re-creating reality not by directly engaging with it but by misrepresenting it or ignoring it altogether.

Anthony, Abram, and Le Guin were, of course, all using language to testify to language’s limits, deceptions, and distortions. By writing, they resisted a conclusion that Merton believed had dangerous implications: that ordinary language is somehow insufficient, that human utterance is meaningless or expended.

In his own time, Merton had witnessed, as a symptom of language’s sickness, the “curious revival of glossolalia.” The practice of speaking in tongues, though present in Christianity from its earliest days, had experienced a dramatic resurgence in Pentecostal and charismatic communities in the twentieth century, a revival Merton was witnessing during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the lead-up to the Vietnam War. The fundamentalists of his day believed that an unknown language of the Spirit was more real than the “ordinary tired everyday language that everybody knows too well.” This breakdown of language was, perhaps, a critique of language’s inadequacy. As a monk who had spent much of his adult life in silence, Merton must have felt drawn to the Spirit’s unknown language, a desire to linger in its syntax. But his written work explicitly rejects this ultimate unknowability, seeing in glossolalia not some deep spiritual insight but a profound moral evasion. “At a time when the churches were at last becoming uneasily aware of a grave responsibility to say something about civil rights and nuclear war,” he wrote, “the ones who could be least expected to be articulate on such subjects (and who often had solid dogmatic prejudices that foreclosed all discussion) began to cry out in unknown tongues.”

Merton left his readers with a contradiction: that someone so suspicious of language and so devoted to silence would become one of the best-known and most prolific Christian writers of the twentieth century. This is the kind of contradiction that he believed was native to any healthy language. A language that refuses what opposes it is tautological; it has a “self-enclosed finality, which rejects dialogue and negotiation on the axiomatic supposition that the adversary is a devil with whom no dialogue is possible.” His archives hold twenty thousand letters to over 2,100 correspondents—voluminous proof of his belief that dialogue was possible and that ordinary language had not yet been exhausted.

Loving language in this era of chatbots, digital scams, and AI hallucinations has, for me, meant coming to terms with language’s limits and its deadening, anti-human capacities, but also hewing close to its inexhaustible communicatory flames. It has required holding on to a contradictory proposition: The medium currently dividing us and feeding the machines that might replace us still has the capacity to sustain life, to express what D.H. Lawrence called the “quick of nascent creation,” our “nakedly passing radiance.”

As alternative realities proliferate and social bonds wither, I’ve grown less interested in the Promethean language that aims to create or perfect worlds than in language that performs the humbler but more spiritually charged task of human communication. As Leo Tolstoy wrote at the end of the nineteenth century,

Language that’s capable of uniting us in the same feelings is specific, sensual, and intimate—increasingly rare qualities in our age of mass communications. The magic of the written word has always been its capacity to float free and leap the gulfs of time, geography, and culture. But our alienated age has made me wonder whether those vast scales can, over time, attenuate the more intimate bonds that language also nurtures. At the same time, a language that’s only intimate can eddy into itself, foreclosing wider communions.

Against the background of inhuman bots howling into a digital void, and in between my winter walks through these memorized, deer-crowded, hometown streets, I’ve hungered for an intimate human language that speaks beyond its echo chambers. There’s a language that listens even as it speaks, that converses with the thick tapestries of voices, sounds, and spirits that vibrate in its silences, that opens not into a void but into the very specific, widening fields of human experience. Lately, I’ve found that language most in letters, an old art form, perhaps, but one so private and limited that it can still paradoxically speak to universal fears and hungers.

Over the winter, I read Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman. The book exemplifies the kind of communicatory language that feels, at least in this moment, “necessary for life,” and it came as a balm for whatever linguistic wounds I was bearing by the end of 2025. They wrote this series of letters before, during, and after Wiman’s experimental bone transplant as an attempt to answer a question: What does it mean to love God? The book’s implicit response to that question is: to write letters to a friend (someone rarer in 2026 than an enemy or neighbour), to accompany them via language through a difficult period, to listen to their words, and to allow the silence between exchanges to speak and be heard. When I think of how to love language again despite its deceit, I think it is to use language as the authors do in this book.

This use is framed by a recognition of language’s inadequacy. As Wiman writes in his first letter, “I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m fifty-six years old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means. . . . I fear those big words—faith, grace, sin, redemption, love—which make us so sad.” Such words make us sad because they “seethe and shift and slip free from meaning. Because they seem to demand some whole-souled attention but are not stable enough to warrant that. Because they are both necessary and impossible, and pinch individual life in that vise.”

In his last letter, Wiman narrates a scene on a street in New Haven, Connecticut. He and Volf are walking near the divinity school where they teach, when suddenly he breaks down. He confesses to Volf that he is not sleeping well and that he is finding an essay he is writing (on Seamus Heaney’s letters) painful and destabilizing. The essay brought him face to face with his own shortcomings as a writer. “I was picking up my own books and thumbing through them like essential instruction manuals in a language I couldn’t read,” he confesses. Volf responds with his own confession: He sometimes feels this way too. This admission releases Wiman from something, or lightens him. “The act,” he writes, “of two bare, forked creatures acknowledging their bare, forked creatureliness enabled Christ to come among them, in them and between them.” In their moment of shared humility, Wiman feels his “life and mind align with the stars and trees.” He grasps both their insignificance and their true radiance. He feels himself within the cage of his own mortality, but also completely free. In this moment, he suddenly believes again in poetry as a “gut feeling,” a primal instinct, an experience of God.

Similarly, Volf confesses that the word “God” sometimes “empties itself of meaning for me, most often, for some reason, in the middle of a prayer.” That emptiness is not desolation, or a denial of faith; it is a space within his faith for God to return to.

The power of these exchanges grows in such spaces, in the gaps (of usually a month or so) between the letters. Life happens in those silences: Each author processes the letter he has received; he second-guesses what he has written and wonders how his friend understood it; books are read; seasons pass; Wiman completes his treatment. Silence feeds the exchanges and orchestrates the book’s pace. It works almost like the third, wordless letter writer, scribbling in its understory.

Silences feed but also unnerve the book. Just as Volf waits in prayer for God to return, these authors wait for each other’s letters to arrive in their inboxes. In the waiting and in those silences, there’s a longing for words that inspires some of the book’s most moving passages. “I haven’t heard from you in a long time,” Wiman writes. “The one rule we had was that we could never complain about the other’s silence, that the correspondence must never become a burden. . . . But I miss you, and also feel a sense of unease about what to do with all these thoughts.”

The question pressed hard on me as I finished the book: What should we do with all these thoughts? What will become of our instincts for meaning-making, reflection, and expression at a time when those very capacities are being contorted into tools on the battlefield? Even the direct, intimate language of letters, of person-to-person communication, is not immune to the ploys of the twenty-first century’s profiteers. In a recent New York Times article, Dan Barry describes “a virtual mudslide of fraud descending upon the publishing world.” He details how “scam artists overseas, using artificial intelligence, are impersonating publishing figures on illegitimate websites and in flattering emails, to hoodwink both fledgling and established authors into paying fees for services never to be rendered.” The “flimflammers” are often book club organizers reaching out to authors who are hungry for an audience, or famous authors like Margaret Atwood and Thomas Pynchon who suddenly descend from great heights to write email letters full of gushing praise for lesser-known writers.

Some writers and editors I know have adapted to this new reality by refusing to pay any attention to the hoaxes, grifters, and bots, and by asserting the purity and power of the written word against all diminutions. But for all the sympathy I have for their arguments—learned, articulate, undiluted, and well-reasoned as they are—I suspect that denial will not be enough to resist the reckoning that awaits us. Our tools are being turned against us. The words that beat at the heart of the scammer’s paradise might be countered with truer words or more artful speech, by refusals of this or that innovation, or via our scrupulous powers of discernment. But our greater challenge remains not to reject the world we’re in, or to perfect our tools, but to love God and love each other. As Saint Thérèse wrote in a letter to her cousin, “In this land of exile the word which begins and ends . . . is quite incapable of rendering the vibrations of the soul; we must then adhere to this simple and only word: LOVE.”

I don’t know what happened to that student of mine from twenty years ago, a teenager at a big school in that halcyon era before the stain of social media, when artificial intelligence was still just some fever dream. I don’t remember his name, but I vaguely recall an average, wiry frame and unremarkable jeans and hoodies. As far as I know, he never wrote any great books or earned any major literary prizes. He barely spoke in class; he slipped in and out of the room, dissolving into the halls of faces and bodies and names that make up my failing memory. But his words still rattle in my head with a wisdom, rawness, intimacy, and openness to reality that never ceases to amaze me. “Out of the mouth of babes,” as my mother liked to say, back when I was idolizing the words of our master writers. If I am, at long last, learning to love language despite its deceit, I have a boy whose name I’ve lost to thank for that.