Book Review

How much can a word contain?

What is said when a word is spoken? And what is left unsaid?

When we write about our lives, what is actually captured by language? And what remains lost to time?

In her new collection, Ravelings: Essays on Love, Loss, and Wonder, Lisa Knopp contemplates these very questions. In the preface, Knopp states that these essays, crafted across twenty years, were “written with no thought of how they might work together in a collection.” At first glance, readers might feel that the seventeen essays Knopp has gathered here have no connection. Essays vary from a meditation on a childhood home to an analysis of still life paintings to a discussion of how Knopp’s dietary preferences differ from that of her son and how those preferences demonstrate a person’s moral code. But it is not those central topics that create a connection; it is Knopp’s eye, what she has fixed her gaze to that draws these essays together, that make them more than the sum of their parts.

If a reader chooses to experience these essays one at a time over the course of several weeks or several months, they might find themselves looking at the subtitle (Love, Loss, and Wonder) and feel as though these essays hold no central connection, that the book can touch upon any aspect of life or all of life. However, seeing these essays juxtaposed beside one another, it becomes clear that Knopp is concerned with how we craft meaning from words and how, in doing so, we craft the very image we have of ourselves and of our reality. Essay to essay, readers are invited to fall in love with words, to meditate on loss when words are not enough, and to wonder how much of our lives, how much complexity, a single word can hold.

At times, this fascination with language can be found in Knopp’s struggle to select the right word. For example, the opening essay, “In the Place of Their Exile,” features Knopp pondering the verb “took” when talking about her father’s various jobs—“He took a similar job at the shops of Lincoln. I want to modify the verb ‘took,’ but any adverb I pick—gratefully? grudgingly? expectantly? reluctantly? hopelessly?—would be speculation,” whereas, at other times, Knopp seemingly finds the perfect word yet cannot help but dig deeper into the meaning of that word and how it can be applied to her life. For example, in “My Velleity,” she comes across a new word and breaks it apart—“Recently I discovered a word that names a feeling I’ve become quite familiar with: ‘velleity,’ a wish or inclination that isn’t strong enough to nudge or push me into action. ‘Velle, then, is an impulse or inclination that hasn’t ripened into intent or action.” Regardless of whether a word is good enough or not enough, this interest in language is not entirely academic. It is not the etymology of these words that captures Knopp’s mind; it is how these words shape our lives. Later in “My Velleity,” Knopp discusses how the naming of emotions allows us to recognize our feelings and to alter those feelings:

‘Affect labelling’ it’s called, and here’s how it works: When we have a strong, negative emotional response to an experience, it tends to activate the ‘alarm system’ situated deep in the amygdala. But when we put our feelings into words, an area in the prefrontal cortex intervenes, dampening the reaction of the amygdala and other limbic regions, thus lowering our stress (or distress) levels.

Words shape our mental, emotional, and physical experiences in this world. What we say about ourselves and about our lives crafts our reality. By learning new words, we can live new lives. This requires us, of course, to pay attention to the language we use.

And this is, ultimately, what Knopp seeks to do: pay attention.

Ravelings opens with a discussion of a specific type of word: contronyms (words whose definitions contradict). As Knopp states, the term “ravelings” is one such word because it could mean “to disentangle” or “to entangle.” She offers other examples: “‘weather’ (‘to withstand’ or ‘to wear away’); ‘fast’ (‘moving quickly’ or ‘firmly attached’); ‘sanction’ (‘to permit’ or ‘to condemn’).” When it comes to contronyms, meaning becomes clear only in the larger context of the sentence and of the paragraph. To sort through what is being said, readers must pay close attention. And if language and our reality are so closely intertwined, to pay attention is to live a full life.

At the end of “Name-staker,” an essay that begins with Knopp watching a man install a new plaque to label flowers, Knopp seems to state her thesis: “Yet, it occurs to me that I should look again, since there might be something growing here that I can’t see because it hasn’t yet been named and staked.” This is what Ravelings teaches readers: to look again, to pause and pay attention to the world and to themselves. Throughout these seventeen essays, readers train their eye as Knopp has trained hers. They learn the depth of an experience. They learn how much a simple walk near a childhood home can contain, and how much can be captured by painting a still life. But they also learn how much is missed in that very still life, how much of ourselves slips away because the lines are just not good enough. Because the words are just not good enough. They learn to pay attention because so much will be missed if they aren’t.