Churchill. But back to “Hyacinth” —rnwhat would happen if it were written inrnHungarian as “Hajszint”? Written, morernthan spoken, with the consequence thatrnamong its readers the idea would occurrnthat the English language, that Englishrnnames, that English women are ugly.rnIf words were only symbols of thingsrn(this is what the computer suggests theyrnare) their meaning would have thernequivalence of facts. “Her name is Hyacinth.rnThat is a fact.” But I, as an historian,rnhave often shocked—without reallyrnwishing to do so—some of my studentsrn(and, alas, some of my colleagues) whenrnI said that history does not consist of factsrnbut of words about facts, because norn”fact” has any meaning by itself Thernmeaning of any and every “fact” dependsrnon our immediate association of it withrnother facts; moreover, its meaning also,rnand inevitably, depends on our statementrn(or call it “phrasing”) of it—rnwhence there are statements in whichrnthe “fact” may be precise but its meaningrnmay be untrue. And so the finding of thernmot juste is the inevitable task not only ofrnthe poet or the novelist but of the historian,rntoo, since his selection of every wordrnis not only a scientific or aesthetic but alsorna moral choice.rnUnlike his great adversary Churchill,rnwho wrote better than he spoke. Hitlerrnwas not a master of the written word. Hernknew that; he said once that his MeinrnKampf must not be read but spoken. Hernwas right in that: There are long portionsrnof Mein Kampf that are unreadable,rnrather than unspeakable. (But then “unspeakable”rnhas a double meaning, too:rnSonrething that ought not be said.) Onrnthe other hand, 20th-eentury literaturernhas plenty of examples of prose that arernreadable rather than speakable—an intellectualrntendency that has, lamentably,rnseeped into the practices of modern orrnpost-modern poetry, too: for poetry that isrnnot speakable cannot be poetry at all.rnDoes this mean that the world is gettingrnmore and more prosaic, perhaps duernto its evolving mechanization? No. Ifrnour images and our imagination are becomingrnmore visual and less verbal, thisrndoes not mean that they are becomingrnless intellectual: to the contrary, since, asrnI wrote before, sight is the most intellectualrnof our senses. Of course, the increasernof intellectuality is not necessarilyrna good thing. The sins of the spirit arernworse than the sins of the flesh; a voyeurrnis no less of a sinner or a pervert than thernmen and women whose acts he watchesrn(or wishes to watch). There is, undoubtedly,rnan increasing intrusion of mind intornmatter—but this does not mean thatrnwords are becoming less meaningful inrnour lives. One of the earliest symptoms,rnbeginning more than 100 years ago, ofrnthe popular transition from verbal to pictorialrnimagination was the printing ofrncomics in the newspapers, somethingrnready-made for slow readers; but mostrncomic strips arc meaningless withoutrnwords in their balloons. Then came therncartoons of the New Yorker type, wherernthe artwork is (or, rather, was) superior tornthe comics but is also dependent on thernwords of its captions, much more tersernand condensed than those of the comics,rnand therefore more intellectual and suggestive.rnAnd now we have the Internetrnthrough which, on occasion, men andrnwomen fall in love by reading each others’rndisembodied messages in words. Inrnsum: The Age of the Book may be comingrnto its end, but the Word was not onlyrnthere in the beginning; it will be therernuntil the end.rnWhat this means is that we may becomernmore sensitive to the quality ofrnwords, including their visual forms, theirrnshapes. This has nothing to do with thernfuture of typography (though it does havernsomething to do with the future ofrnspelling). It goes deeper. It occurs withinrnthe conscious, not the subconscious,rnfunctioning of our minds —at a timernwhen we must begin thinking aboutrnthinking itself And thinking is inseparablernfrom the words we know, includingrntheir various qualities. Quantities are definablernand mathematically fixable.rnQualities are not. Their sources lie deeprnin our minds. They are existential realities.rnComputers can do fabulous calculationsrnof quantities — but not of qualities,rnin the sense in which Plato hadrnrecognized their existence.rnThe word quality is used by mostrneducated people every day of theirrnlives, yet iir order that we shouldrnhave this simple word Plato had tornmake the tiemendous effort (it isrnone of the most exhausting whichrnman is called on to exert) of turningrna vague feeling into a clearrnthought. He invented the newrnword “poiotes,” “what-ness,” as wernmight say, or “of-what-kind-ness,”rnand Cicero translated it by thernLatin “qualitas,” from “qualis.”rnThus wrote Owen Barfield in his Historyrnin English Words, which I consider onernof the most important works of this century.rnAnd in this inadequate attempt ofrnan essay, I have tried to take a step further,rnto suggest the association of wordsrnnot only with their histories and withrntheir sounds but with their shapes, withrntheir meaning perceived not only withrnour ears but also with our eyes. But perhapsrnShakespeare had already knownrnthis when he wrote about imagination:rnAnd as imagination bodies forthrnThe forms of things unknown, thernpoet’s penrnTurns them to shapes and gives tornairy nothingrnA local habitation and a name.rnJohn Lukacs is the author, most recently,rnof A Thread of Years (Yale UniversityrnPress).rnFOREIGN AFFAIRSrnReflections onrna Texan’s Visitrnto Bosniarnby David HartmanrnSince retiirning from a visit to Bosnia-rnHerzegovina arranged by The RockfordrnInstitute to consult with the Republicrnof Srpska (one of Bosnia’s componentrnstates) on privatization of its socialist industries,rnI have given considerablernthought as to what Americans (especiallyrnTexans) might learn from the recent decompositionrnof Yugoslavia.rnYugoslavia was created after WorldrnWar I by President Woodrow Wilsonrnand his allies at Versailles as an illconceivedrnconglomeration of Balkan nationsrnfreed by the dissolution of thernAustro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.rnSerbia, which had been liberatedrnfrom the Turks, had an uneasy coexistencernuntil World War II, when it wasrnconquered first by Nazi Germany andrnsubsequently by Soviet-backed communists.rnThe latter liquidated the non-communist,rnanti-Nazi resistance and superimposedrncommunism. Following thernJANUARY 1999/45rnrnrn