If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the critical role of language and writing in preserving humanity and civilization.
Robert Bringhurst's quote highlights the importance of language and writing as fundamental to human civilization. It suggests that while the loss of language might signify a profound loss for humanity itself, the loss of writing would only affect certain forms of society and culture, implying that alternative societies could still thrive without it. This perspective invites reflection on the resilience of human experience and the varied forms civilization can take, even in the face of loss.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of preserving indigenous languages.
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.
Typography exists to honor content.
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?
Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.
Small wonder our national spirit is husk empty. We have more information but less knowledge. More communication but less community. More goods but less goodwill. More of virtually everything save that which the human spirit requires. So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness
Death is more certain than the morrow, than night following day, than winter following summer. Why is it then that we prepare for the night and for the winter time, but do not prepare for death. We must prepare for death. But there is only one way to prepare for death - and that is to live well.
Whatever life takes away from you, let it go.
Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
We must remember that the people of all the States are entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the citizen of the several States. We should bear this in mind, and act in such a way as to say nothing insulting or irritating. I would inculcate this idea, so that we may not, like Pharisees, set ourselves up to be better than other people.
Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.
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