Why we “read books”

During our trip to Washington D.C. a few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Timothy Snyder and Nora Krug’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The book is part history book, as the “lessons from the twentieth century” indicates, a part guide to how to work to preserve democracy when confronted with fascism or totalitarianism. Multiple things stand out to me with this book; however, today I want to focus on lesson nine, “Be kind to our language.”

This lesson stands out because it makes me, in many ways, think about myself. Snyder’s introduction to this section contains a few main points. He writes that we need to “[a]void pronouncing the phrases everyone else does.” Instead, we must construct our “own way of speaking,” even if that construction is to help us understand what everyone else is saying. Here, I think about the “soundbite” news cycle we have and the aimless chants of political rallies. These things, with their lightening speed, move in and out of our field of view, and we react to them one way or another.

To highlight this fast-moving speed, Krug depicts multiple men wrestling in a ring. They are entangled with one another, and we cannot determine, at times, where one man ends and another begins. Visually, we see a jumbled mass, indistinguishable as individuals and presented as one big entity. Snyder writes, “Politicians in our times feed their clichés to…