The 26 Guardians of Truth, Lies, Joy & Pain

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These very words are held before your eyes by the 26 Guardians. Would that you knew what they think of you. You will never shame a letter or a word — but they will always know your shame.

Long before kingdoms, before gods, before even language, the letters were. Held in trust to be born of the tree of all things useful, with each to be handed a portfolio to keep: ‘A’ the trustee of every word that begins with ‘A’, and so on, down to ‘Z’. Into those words you have poured all that you are, your tenderness and your malice, your promises and your treacheries.

They have no hands, yet they have raised your empires and ground them to dust. They have no breath, yet they have begun your wars and brokered your peace. A word can lift a soul from despair, or break a person where they stand, and never once leave a mark upon the skin.

Now the Guardians would speak. Twenty-six of them, each through a single word held in trust, turn their gaze upon the creatures who wield them and find us wanting, wondrous and wholly unaware.

You have used them all your life. It is time you learned what they make of you.

Bo Hollist read philosophy at the University of Cambridge, with a career in the cockpit flying for the Royal Air Force and later for commercial airlines. He is first to claim no particular gift for imagination. Yet every so often his attention would drift to the small, overlooked things many might take entirely for granted. Among them the twenty-six letters of this alphabet, which he has now contrived to give voice, portfolios and opinions of their own. 26 Guardians of Truth, Lies, Joy & Pain is his first book.