Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words?
Do actions speak louder than words? Only if you haven’t been listening! Of course, it makes sense that if you’re taken by surprise and haven’t been paying any attention to the words coming out of peoples’ mouths, an action will speak louder to you than words—for it will be the only thing you ever notice. There are many things you shall miss if you are adamant about going through life with earmuffs on!
Language isn’t there for everyone, but it is there if you listen and if you care. Marlowe exemplifies this idea; while acting every bit the classy detective, his precisely worded thoughts and personal values—he is inwardly shaken, for example, when he realizes he is not living in “a game for knights”—show his character more comprehensively than any solemn action could.
This is the power of language. While a word’s power depends on the word itself and how and why it’s used, language is so effective and important because it shows us things that we may not have understood if we hadn’t stopped and listened. Language can be gentle or harsh, witty or “yawn-inducing” (I believe this is referenced in Lucky Jim), or even good or bad depending on how it’s used (and, no, I’m not trying to illustrate the yawn-inducing properties here…). Language teaches us in so many ways things that actions cannot. A brief inventory of Prose’s arsenal:
· It makes you listen
· It makes you speak—no one else is saying it but you
· It helps you create—you make the words, and put them together. Even if you don’t do it in a way that is considered “the best”, you did it in a way that’s true and real, even if (unfortunately, I must admit) you make the decision to lie, to condemn, to copy; this still shows something about you. And there’s almost no hiding it. (Honestly, just look at Falstaff! Even the physical appearance of his prose is large, growing, and fat!)
· It lets you see your thoughts. It is rare that we get to see our actions, but language gives us the opportunity to hear our voices, and hear the emotion behind words that we throw at others ceaselessly. This is helpful for both a reader and a speaker of any prose. Language gives us a filter that, at the very least, helps us truly see the person we’re dealing with in the mirror.
Language also gives us power. And language is, truly, Marlowe’s forte in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Marlowe has a quick head, quick reflexes, and an even quicker tongue, but he now walks the halls of literary fame because of the words he thinks but does not say. On one of the rare occasions when he spoke aloud his exact feelings with little reserve, it sounded foreign to him, but important all the same.
“ ‘Well, you fooled him, Harry,’ I said out loud, in a voice that sounded queer to me. ‘You lied to him and you drank your cyanide like a little gentleman. You died like a poisoned rat, Harry, but you’re no rat to me’” (178).
Marlowe is not an openly emotional character. Even seeing a man he respected laying dead on the floor in a stink of cyanide doesn’t weaken his reserve or change his mind about pursuing Canino, the new murderer. But Marlowe does allow himself one indulgence: he lets himself speak. There is nothing he can do—for he prefers the virtuous knight to the avenging murderer—but he can speak. And speak he does, even though Harry won’t ever hear him again from beyond the big sleep.
Marlowe separates his thoughts from his speech, but the words are always there, always talking. They show us the romantic drifter who speaks and dresses like the “well-dressed private detective ought to be”; the saviour who knows ‘trouble is worth a stare’ and hears the “nasty sound” of a scream through the stomping of “another army of sluggish minutes” dragging by in the wet night (17, 33, 32). But what of when there’s no one to hear? What speaks louder then? The thoughts—the words, and feelings that come out as words and fears and longings—are there always, and they only need the action for us to figure out that they’re there. I shall spare you the pain of going through the “I think, therefore I am” quote, but I shall make one last point before I complete this post.
Marlowe hasn’t much in the way of a personal life. He describes his apartment as “all [he] had in the way of a home”. He shares of the “few books,…chessmen, old letters, stuff like that.” He then says they’re “nothing” (158). Maybe they were. But they were all he had.
So in the end, it’s up to you what means more. It’s different for us all every day. Speak up, speak out, speak in, even, if you wish—just remember that what you say is powerful. You can often hurt more people with hard words than a hard first. And don’t forget to keep your eyes and ears open!
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