Pictures Built from Words

I subscribed to The New Yorker last year on a whim. Truth be told, it seemed like an intellectual magazine, perhaps a bit snobbish, and it was only $37 for the yearlong subscription. Thirty-seven dollars is a low price for the right to be intellectual, and a bit snobby, for an entire year.

What I didn’t realize at the time is just how devoted the magazine is to its writing. I suppose that technically all publications are in some way devoted to good writing—even this humble blog attempts to produce at least a semblance of something readable—but The New Yorker takes it to an art.

It is probably more accurate to say, in fact, that The New Yorker is devoted to the art of writing rather than just to writing well. It does not just inform you about the subject, or persuade you, or entertain you. Instead, the authors seek to build a picture out of words for you. It may be true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but then how do we value a picture built from words?

This idea of pictures built from words occurred to me while I was reading Ian Frazier’s “Travels in Siberia“. As Frazier was describing the vast Russian hinterlands and the eclectic people whom he encountered along his “ultimate road trip”, I kept thinking that the trip would have been perfect fodder for one of those National Geographic articles filled with amazing pictures of foreign places and things. Then I realized that such pictures would be redundant; Frazier’s words were the images.

Not to say that pictures are unnecessary. National Geographic just wouldn’t be itself without its incredible images (though there has been a sad decline in the amount of informative writing accompanying them in recent years). But in this case the images would have hindered the telling of the tale.

Frazier paints with his words as a painter puts oil on a canvas. Or, from a different point of view, he uses them as a chisel like a sculptor; he begins with the stereotype of Siberia and whittles it away until all that remains is the essence of the land. Reading his account draws you into his travels as much as gazing at the horizon of the steppes in a picture could ever pull you in.

My attempts at painting a picture with words of Frazier’s picture with words, for that is what I am quickly falling into, will inevitably fail. So I’ll leave you with simply an emphatic recommendation that you read Travels in Siberia, parts one and two.

Tags: picture, The New Yorker, words, writing