2nd Flame Alphabet Selection

“Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it’s the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us” (266).

This passage was one of the most thought-provoking in The Flame Alphabet for me. After pondering the statement, I wondered why the author did not bring up thought until this late in the novel. After all, thought is the basis of language. Without thought, language would not be possible or necessary. Thoughts come to us in the form of words and phrases. The influence that language has over our mental processes is amazing, and it is amazing how easy it is to forget about the importance of language on thought. On a deeper level, this passage brings up the idea of mental illness and depression. In this novel, speech and the written word caused an epidemic that affected the population physically. In real life, thought has already afflicted a great many people, but not in a physical way. It is an interesting point to realize that there are toxic characteristics to thought and language that affect people in a very real way, and it is not just the work of fiction writers.