The Last One Who Says It That Way

There are about four hundred words. He has never counted them and would not know how to begin, and four hundred is a guess he made once and has stuck with.

It is not a language. It is a way of saying a language, from one valley, and it has particular words in it for things that do not exist anywhere else, including a word for the specific quality of light about forty minutes before a storm, and a word that means the last one of something when there was supposed to be more.

His grandmother had it. His mother had about half of it. His sister has perhaps twenty words and uses three of them as jokes. His own children have the three, as jokes, from their aunt.

He is sixty eight.

About two years ago he started saying them out loud. Alone, in the kitchen, mostly in the morning. Not systematically; he is not making a list. He will be doing something and a word will arrive and he will say it, once, at ordinary volume, into a room with nobody in it, and then carry on.

He has never told anybody he does this and he would find explaining it almost impossible.

Once, in the spring, he said the word for the light before a storm and then stood still for a while with a cloth in his hand, because it had occurred to him for the first time in that exact form that when he stops, the sound stops. Not the meaning; a person could write down what it means. The sound of it, made by a mouth, in the world, ends.

He is not sentimental and would resist the word. What he would say, if he could be got to say anything, is that it seems wrong for a thing to simply stop, and that he cannot make an argument for why it is wrong, and that saying them in the kitchen is not solving anything and he does it anyway.

You will have your own four hundred words. The thing you are the end of, that you keep doing something small about, without being able to say why.

The line that got written for people not yet born

There is a verse buried in a long, bleak psalm, written by somebody in genuine trouble, and it turns aside for one sentence to do something structurally strange.

Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord.Psalm 102:18

The psalmist is in the middle of describing his own life falling apart. And in the middle of it he says: write this down for people who do not exist yet.

Notice what he is not doing. He is not saying his own name will survive. He never asks to be remembered by that generation. He asks that something be recorded so that they will praise God, and the content of the record is God's dealings rather than his own biography.

And notice who does the recording. He does not appoint a survivor. He does not identify an heir, or a nephew, or a library. Let this be recorded, in the passive, by somebody unnamed, and the psalm simply leaves it there and moves on, apparently satisfied.

So take it plainly: you are inside a record that does not require a survivor to keep it, and that is what Psalm 102 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence from the middle of a breakdown and lays it down in a kitchen at seven in the morning.

Which reaches the thing that happened in the spring with the cloth in his hand. His trouble is that the sound ends when he ends, and there is no mechanism by which it does not. He is entirely right about the mechanism. There is not one.

The psalm does not supply one either. It does not promise that anything he does will carry. What it does is describe a record that is kept elsewhere, by somebody else, without appointing him to the task and without making his ending the end of anything that finally matters.

You have been inside something being kept rather than responsible for keeping it, because the written word puts the recording in the passive and never names a custodian, and His Spirit is what makes that land on a man who cannot explain why he says words to an empty kitchen.

And there is a small thing in that verse worth having, which is who the record is for. Not for the psalmist. Not for his own comfort or his own name. For a people yet to be created, which is a phrase about strangers who will never know he existed. He is content with that. He does not ask to be attached to the thing he is asking be kept. You have been free to be unattached to what is preserved, and Scripture is what shows a man choosing that rather than my recommending it, and His Spirit is the one who makes being unattached feel like room instead of loss.

What he is not being asked to do

Now the guardrail, and it is essential here.

Nobody is telling him to record the four hundred words. Not for his children, not for a university, not for anybody. If he wants to, he may, and it would be a good thing and this article has no opinion about it. But he did not come here for a task and he is not going to be handed one, because turning a grief into a project is one of the commonest ways of making it heavier while appearing to help.

And nobody is telling him that somebody will one day take an interest. I do not know that and Scripture does not say it and predicting it would be furnishing a silence with my own guesses.

What is on offer is smaller and it is the only thing that actually reaches the kitchen: he is known, and the valley is known, and his grandmother is known, and the word for the light before a storm is known by the one who made both the light and the storm and the mouth that named it.

You are held by a regard that does not depend on transmission, because the written word keeps its own record without appointing an heir, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing to hand on and nothing to rescue, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what stops an ache from becoming an assignment.