A Language Older Than Words

Rating:
Summary: POWERFUL
Review: This is my favorite book by my favorite author. No way anyone could read this and not be changed in a profound way.

Rating:
Summary: Connection
Review: This is one of the most profoundly moving books I've ever read. I absolutely encourage everyone to buy it and read it, over and over. Never before have I read words that so courageously challenge our assumptions about the way we live while simultaneously awakening a profoundly intimate connection with our souls. Jensen weaves a story of abuse, love, and impassioned relationship with family, friends, nature, culture, and self. The son of a wealthy attorney in western Montana, Derrick Jensen reveals heart-wrenching details of his own childhood, and uses these experiences as a springboard to talk about the culture at large. In a provocative weaving of his own experience, critical research, and folk stories, Jensen makes clear the relationship between the intimate atrocities of domestic violence and the larger atrocities of ecological destruction. Yet, he promises that when we begin to change our way of living, on both personal and cultural levels, we will find a whole world of connection waiting for us. It is a world of joy and pain and love and sorrow, but most deeply of all, connection. With masterful skill, awareness, and insight, Jensen's hard-hitting yet poetic writing style forces readers into an acute awareness-and deep experience--of the connected relationships between our personal lives and the world. This book is a guide for living and should be read by anyone interested in being alive.

Rating:
Summary: A Language Better Than Words
Review: W.S. Merwin, poet and lover of the land, writes "If I want to talk of trees, I will have to use a forgotten language." These words puzzled me when first I found them ten years ago. As is the case with most great lines, my memory absorbed them: I would one day understand. Slowly, as a result of more paradigm shifts in my thinking than I care to count, that day has come. At the heart of A Language Older Than Words lies a philosophical treatise: if we as a species desire to survive, we must liberate ourselves from the constraints of rational thought. Such a notion will startle the covenanted rational man, cause him to seize up, to tighten his grip upon his notion of reality--"I think therefore, I am;" "Not trees but sense-contents of trees." He must find the closest possible means by which to descredit the source of the words that have disturbed him. He will say, drawing on rhetoric of Psych 101--"The author is acting out."--or Logic 208--"This book contains a contradiction, therefore it is not real book." He does so in order to protect that which he holds true. He puts the book down and selects another which will congratulate him for being who he is, what he is a part of.

This book does not congratulate anyone. In its Brechtian diatribes on the post-treaty Gulf War devastation, the multinational melange present on any and all plates at supper time, the genocide of native populations committed by colonists (corporate and otherwise), and the eradication of countless species populations, as well as the author's own experiences with violence (at others' hands as well as his own), A Language Older Than Words documents the crimes of rational man, of Western Culture, of America.

In Jensen's writing, the personal is political. His logic is associative, rather than rational. In these ways, the book itself practices the very lessons it conveys. If humans will survive on this planet, they must alter their concept of logic. There can be no more hiding behind judgement of others ("The author's acting out...") in order to facilitate the very mechanism of silencing that Jensen challenges on every single page. There can be no more isolating of one's personal experience from the sea of all human events. No tidepool will go unrecalled.

What is writ large in world events is writ small in all our lives. Jensen invites anyone who has chosen to believe they are happy and whole to reconsider if they disagree. He asks us to question why we consume so much and love so little, why we destroy so much and devalue creation? Once the reader considers these questions, they will feel that everything they "know" and "hold true" quakes in the presence of the answers. The shifts in thinking this book can lead to are frightening. But Jensen holds us to him. In the epilogue he draws us near--the reader feels they are being blessed with strength, confidence, and deep human love. "Godspeed," he whispers. And the reader wants to weep. We realize that, as the poet asks God to do in John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14, Jensen has "battered [our] heart" in order to let us subvert reason and believe once again with our entire being something we feel shyly to be true.

I am reminded most strongly of Sojourner Truth's "Speak truth to power with love." In Jensen's "Language" and words, the reader experiences the execution of Truth's charge. From a lesser writer, the ideas conveyed might read like hate mail to corporations, patriots, and true believers of any kind--and those who have yet to explore the questions Jensen asks will dismiss it as such and go on with their lives--but in Jensen's hands--just like the bird's egg in the nest on the cover--the ideas are delivered as more of a love letter addressed to anyone who feels their life does not belong to them, and begins every morning with a soft wish that it did.

If everyone were to read and consider deeply this book, W.S. Merwin's words may never have to come true. In the meantime, however, reading "A Language Older Than Words" prepares us should we soon indeed have to speak "a forgotten language." Jensen is speaking it already.

Rating:
Summary: A book everyone should read
Review: Words cannot do this book justice, but let me say that "A Language Older Than Words" is one of the best books I have ever read, and by "best" I mean: its message is important; it is memorable; it is sincere/authentic; and the prose is excellent (Jensen's story/message is conveyed artistically). This book should be required reading for human beings. National Book Award, Pulitzer, you name it: there is no award this book does not deserve. In fact, there is no award worthy of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Five Stars Aren't Enough
Review: _A Language Older Than Words_ is one of the best books I have ever read. Derrick Jensen is without a doubt my favorite author of all time, and I highly recommend all of his books.

_A Language Older Than Words_ is written in a unique style which blends Derrick Jensen's personal experiences, conversations with other authors and activists, critical cultural analysis, as well as historical and contemporary events and facts to back up his analysis.

If you are concerned with domestic violence, ecological destruction, how civilization is responsible for both, and where we should look for answers, then this is a book for you.

No other author has contributed more to the way I view the natural world, civilization, and this culture in particular than Derrick Jensen. I recommend all his books, but I think _A Language Older Than Words_ is probably the best of his books to start with.

_A Language Older Than Words_ is written in a very non-linear conversational style. What at first appears like unrelated tangents are masterfully woven into a complex vision of how the silencing of the natural world is related to the silencing of the oppressed and abused. Intertwined with those concepts are gut wrenching first hand accounts of both, as well as other attrocities in the culture at large. But while there is much that is dark, the book on a whole shows a hopeful path to reconnection with ourselves and the natural world.

I first read _A Language Older Than Words_ a few years ago, and I have continually lent my copy to friends, and recommended it to everyone I know. If there is any hope for humanity, and any hope that the natural world won't be completely decimated, I think some of the wisdom in this book will help guide the way.

The reason that I love this book the most is because it is intensely personal in the way that it is written, in the subjects that are discussed, and what the author reveals about himself. Derrick Jensen's cultural criticism and analysis is not some abstract intellectualized theory, but rather put together and put forth in a very down to earth and easy to grasp way. He pulls no punches, and is willing to go against cultural convention when necessary to speak what the pepetrators of abuse (domestic, ecological, economic, social, and political) would have us all remain silent about.