7 Softness, Shape, Innocence An oft-quoted television commercial once touted whispering as a means of getting a person's attention. And, indeed, words are sometimes more penetrating when spoken softly, "like a feather on the breeze." She spoke quietly, but something -- the word magic seemed almost too ordinary -- shimmered in the room.54 Aldous Huxley said of such speech: "Soft, soft, but how piercing! boring and drilling into reason, tunnelling through resolution." Say a magic word softly, as if it were a dim, distant memory, as if you were conjuring it from your own depths, where it had been locked away for safekeeping. Author Steve Cash provides an excellent example: It had been fourteen years since she'd seen her father's face, and physically he had aged twice that, but she walked over to him and sat on the bed next to him and held his hand in both of hers. "Papa," she said in the softest voice. "Papa," she said again, then again and again as if the word itself had shape and weight and meaning beyond the sound. It was a word to her from another life, another self. It was a word she'd buried in order to survive, but used without speaking it aloud to protect her . . . It was her secret word, her magic word. "Papa" had power. "Papa" was the one word that kept her alive and the one word she never thought she would say again. As with Papa in the passage above, every magic word should be spoken as if it has shape,57 weight, and "meaning beyond the sound."58 It should be spoken as a relic from another time, as something once buried for its own survival,59 as something unspoken that dimly endures in one's memory, as a subtle but vital energy. Speak a magic word as if you might never utter it again, with all the innocent awe of a child beseeching a parent. 5 Eric Butterworth, The Universe is Calling (1994) 54 Nora Roberts, Heaven and Earth (2001) Brave New World (19 2) The Meq (2005) 57 For example, "The language was unfamiliar to Kim, but every word seemed to hang in the air, clear and sharp as broken crystal. She could almost feel their edges." -- Patricia C. Wrede, Mairelon the Magician (1991) 58 As sleight-of-hand magician, linguist, naturalist, and philosopher David Abram observes, "Linguistic meaning is not some ideal and bodiless essence that we arbi- trarily assign to a physical sound or word and then toss out into the 'external' world. Rather, meaning sprouts in the very depths of the sensory world, in the heat of meet- ing, encounter, participation" (The Spell of the Sensuous [1996]). 59 In relation to buried relics, consider how "the word Egyptian has a mysterious sound about it, and calls up visions of thaumaturgists working wonders in crypt, temple, and pyramid" (Henry Ridgely Evans, "Evansoniana," Magic [1902]).