A Thousand Words

If you could only speak (or write, or type) a thousand words, what would you say? Could you express all your thoughts and feelings in a thousand linked letters, a thousand spaces? If every picture is truly worth a thousand words, it should be child’s play to find the words that go with it, to divine the story behind each stroke of pencil or paintbrush. Yet, frustratingly, a thousand words is a difficult medium to work with. Even a hundred words is a feat for some people, but a thousand? Could you write a poem that long, or a book that short? A history of the world, condensed to a thousand characters, or a sonnet, a ballad to a lover that encompasses all that they are in a thousand words? The thousand words behind a picture, behind a poem, behind a person are as hard to find as a treasure on a mountain, and each one we can find should be treated as though it were spoken gold, a beauty to the ears but blown away with the wind in an instant, if we don’t listen hard enough.  A single stroke of the brush, a turn of the head, a glint of the light, and the words shuffle and re-form themselves into a completely new organization, each more beautiful than the last – every angle must be considered, every inch, every side of the story, before you can hope to encompass the wonder in front of you in a medium such as language; how could we possibly translate the diction of a sunset into the vocabulary of the word, or the shine of falling hair into the ink on a page? A single tear shed, a single leaf falling, half a whisper’s breath, and the story hidden inches below becomes deeper than the vast ocean, wider than the glorious sky, more refreshing than a summer’s breeze, more energizing than the heat of battle… for in pictures, we are limited to what we see, but in words, we are free to immerse ourselves, even if only for a brief thousand moments. In a painting, one can see but a thousand words to make up the story, but in a thousand words, a million pictures spring to life, weaving, dancing, melding together to form a more complete story than an image ever could; words give you the freedom to fill in the black and white ink on the page with an infinitude of colors and motions. A painting, degraded to black and white, to words on a page, can never compare with a picture brought to mind from the first sentence of a book, or the closing stanza of a poem. Language is a gift to man, a boon to our species shared by none other on the planet – should we not make the most use of it we can in this flicker of an existence granted to us? Images fade, paint cracks, the world changes, but so long as a single book remains, so long as the echo of a thought sighs within the mind of a reader, the story can be re-written, re-painted a thousand different ways. From this is born true freedom of expression, for a painting cannot be changed once it is framed, but a book can be re-written and transformed a billion times over in the course of a day, transferred not just by sight, but by sound and touch, by whisper or shout, by silent reading or by booming announcement to millions upon millions of devout readers, yearning to understand more, divining conclusions of their own as to a few words’ meaning – for words have started movements, words have toppled empires, and words have put their readers, their listeners, where none dared step before. Words put humans beyond the bounds of the sky; words ended the greatest dynasties on the earth; words have bound innumerable couples in the most intimate and sacred of human relationships; words have turned good friends into mortal enemies in less time than it takes their hearts to beat. Words have encouraged the weak; they have brought humility to the strong. The ability to read is that much harder to come by than the ability to see – does this not make the written word that much more elegant than the painted portrait? But herein lies the fundamental connection of words and pictures – if not for the pictures they inspire, how could we find any meaning in words? Without the words to describe it, what is a painting but so many meaningless strokes upon a canvas? We create images to cover our books, and titles to adorn our paintings; these two mediums of projected thought are absolutely intertwined, and should never be brought apart – each picture we find may be worth only a thousand words, but from it, we can divine a billion. Each word may be meaningless by itself, but combined in a thousand different ways, they create a more complete painting than anything any of us could ever even dare to dream of; how could anyone encapsulate more than a few sentences in a picture, let alone a ballad or a book? Epics, legends, even novels – as incomplete and meaningless as the scattered breeze left behind after a storm without the pictures to go with them. Words fall like so many drops of rain from the clouds of our mind at the mere sight of a picture – what is to stop us from allowing this cleansing rain to refresh our mind, revitalize our soul, open us to new and astounding ways of thinking that would never even have occurred to us an instant before? Words can wash away prejudices, clean away old rivalries, and bring two eternally warring nations to peace at long last – in as little as a single sentence. In a thousand words, a story can begin and end, an empire can rise and fall, a romance can develop and bloom – a happily ever after that we can all share.