Tenderness and the Gas Chambers
The title of this conference is taken from a novel written by a doctor. The author is Walker Percy. The novel is his last one, The Thanatos Syndrome, written in 1987. It tells the story of a psychiatrist who discovers that the government is conducting illegal mood-altering experiments on the unsuspecting population of a small town in order to eliminate violent crimes. The time of the action is in the near future. Abortion and euthanasia have become a common practice in the medical profession. Living in the same place is this old priest, considered an eccentric because he refuses to live in a parish and minister there. Instead he lives on top of a tower used to spot forest fires. In one conversation with the psychiatrist, the priest tells him of his refusal to preach. It is useless, he says, because words have been deprived of their meaning. Words convey experiences oflife, experiences of our relation to nature, to the world and to others. Most important, words express our experience of the cosmos, that is, of the universe as a whole, of reality. Language expresses our relationship, our attitude, our stand with respect to the reality we experience. That is why certain words or expressions should not be translated literally, for they would not make any sense. Take, for example, the expression: ''I'll buy that" to indicate agreement with what someone says. To my knowledge, there is no language other than English where buying is synonymous with agreeing. This tells us that those who use that expression experience the exchange of ideas and information in commercial categories like buying and selling. To live is somehow experienced as one great commercial enterprise. When you translate ''I'll buy that" to another language, you'll have to simply say "I agree" in that language, but something has been lost in the translation of your experience of reality. Words, then, are signs, they are symbols, that convey much more than information. They convey personal experiences. To grow up speaking a given language is to experience life as those people who speak that language experience it. When you use words, therefore, you are communicating much more than your