The Power of Words: Literature for a Better Life

Many authors have attempted to answer the age-old question of what literature is, and among them, the French writer Charles du Bos offers a particularly thought-provoking and revealing perspective in his book Approaches: “[Literature] is nothing more than life itself, when […] it is combined with the fullness of expression”. Above all, she wants to make clear the intimate and inseparable connection between life and literature, in such a way that “Without life, literature would be devoid of content; but without literature, life would be nothing more than a waterfall—an unending waterfall in which each of us would be submerged, a waterfall devoid of meaning.”. 

Du Bos goes on to explain that “If literature owes its content to life, life owes its survival to literature; it owes it that immortality that stops only at the threshold of the eternal, that immortality beyond which eternal life begins.”. In other words, in literature we find the essence of life; we are constantly confronted with the great themes of human existence, with the profound questions that people throughout the ages—from antiquity to the present day—have asked themselves, and which Italo Calvino lists as follows: “the way of looking at others and at oneself, […] of attributing value to big things and small things, […] of finding the proper balance in life, the place love occupies in it, as well as its strength and rhythm, and the place that death deserves, the way of thinking about it or not thinking about it […], duration, compassion, sadness, irony, and humor”. Now, among all forms of artistic expression, literature is characterized by the word. Therein lies its power, its strength, and its irreplaceable role and mission, because, as Calvino says, the word “It connects the visible trace with the invisible thing”. 

The Mysterious Power of Words

Words allow us to access the mystery of life, the mystery of being. They are the key to everything. Words contain those “vibrations of the primordial”, the ones Steiner spoke of that draw us into the unknown, leading us to “Beyond the Shadow Line”, fleeing from emptiness and meaninglessness, longing for a paradise in which humankind was connected to God, or a mythological era in which gods and humans, for better or worse, coexisted and interacted. The words in literary works are neither arbitrary nor written at random; on the contrary, they are transformative, exploring unlimited possibilities in search of a truth—that truth which, at its deepest level, seeks to give life its fullness, transporting it to a metaphysical and, why not, religious order. 

God's Fingerprint

But when it comes to the written word, we must not forget something fundamental—something that acts as the driving force and power that elevates literature to the highest heights. I am referring to the following verse from the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. This revolutionizes the way we relate to words. The Word becomes flesh, becomes man: God becomes incarnate; God takes on human nature to its very limits. 

Nothing human is alien to God. From now on, words become, all the more so, those vestiges of the divine that seek the profound meaning of life. It is no longer possible to conceive of any literary expression that disregards this reality. It is logical to affirm, in the beautiful words of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, that the “God’s fingerprint on human clay”. And despite countless attempts to erase that trace, they are all doomed to failure.

The Dead End of Absurdity

Indeed, when Samuel Beckett, after the end of World War II—with its trail of destruction, death, and dehumanization—wrote Waiting for Godot, the great question of the meaning of life is posed. He answers by revealing the absurdity of human existence, depicting and reflecting the failure of salvation, the questioning of God’s goodness and mercy, and the existential anguish that stems from all of this. Faced with the radical absence of God, Beckett invites us to imagine the world without Him. And in this staging—through characters reduced to their bare essentials, who lack the attributes necessary to be considered as such, nor do they even have names to humanize them, he reveals the dead end in which humanity finds itself—a humanity that has replaced hope with the agonizing wait that unfolds in a cyclical and immutable time. 

Through extraordinary technical perfection, he breaks with all established norms. The unfinished, repetition, and existential weariness—brought about by the crushing effect of binary structure and rhythm—become defining characteristics of this new man, who has no alternative but empty waiting or suicide. The words reflect the emptiness of existence; grammatical order abandons its function to reveal the failure of language, which no longer serves to communicate but rather to fill a deafening silence with sound. Therefore, every grammatical sequence, every word, becomes a thematic motif, dominated by allusions to the Crucifixion and its meaning, as well as to the image of God who is moving away from mercy to become cruel and violent, until reaching the most absolute indifference. 

Rediscovering Life's Essential Bonds

On the contrary, well into World War II, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published The Little Prince, where the same question about the meaning of existence is also raised. However, the answer is radically different, for it speaks of ascension after the fall, of relationship, of love; of encounter and of reestablishing bonds with those who form part of our primary life circle. Only in this way can loneliness be overcome, and only in this way is love possible. Recovering lost unity becomes his life’s mission. With a distinctly poetic style, through the use of symbols, he suggests a sense of transcendence and the need for love—a source of light and water that quenches thirst—with clear evangelical resonances. 

Ultimately, literature draws us into the mysteries of life and of being, and in doing so, seeks to gradually reveal and shed light on a truth about humanity. Words unfold evocative meanings that point to something beyond—the Word, a Word that is Truth and Life. Life is, therefore, infinitely richer with literature, and without a doubt, as Tzvetan Todorov asserts, “It allows us all to better live out our calling as human beings”.