From N. D. Wilson's Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent:

This world is all incarnation. Words made flesh. Words. God has seen and God has said. His imagination is bone-shaking and soul-shivering, and He has never groped for words to capture (and be) those things. He imagined galaxies and clogged drains and sharks and harmonies and emotions and running and villains and foes and fungus and that heavy marriage of airs that we call water that can skip rocks and light and wind, that can quench and freeze and baptize. He imagined and felt the ache of a mother's love and the mortal yearning caused by the thrust of time and the speed of a falcon and the fear of a hare and minor cords and the smell of carpet glue. And none of these things were as good as ideas. They became words. Sounds mouthed by the Infinite. Rhythms, verbally and fleshed and shaped by the divine. They were spoken.

I'm currently reading C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words. 

Two things particularly stand out to me as I am reading this book: first, the breadth and depth of Lewis's reading; and second, his incredible memory of what he has read. Let me give an example. In the second chapter of the book, he is discussing the different meanings of the word "nature" down through the centuries. One of these meanings is Nature personified, or "Great Mother Nature." Lewis discusses this usage in the following paragraph:

[The use of the word "nature" to refer to] Great Mother Nature has proved a most potent sense down to the present day. It is 'she' who does nothing by leaps, abhors a vacuum, is die gute Mutter, is red in tooth and claw, 'never did betray the heart that loved her', eliminates the unfit, surges to ever higher and higher forms of life, decrees, purposes, warns, punishes and consoles. Even now I am not sure that this meaning is always used purely as a figure, to say what would equally make sense without it. The test is to remove the figure and see how much sense remains. Of all the pantheon Great Mother Nature has, at any rate, been the hardest to kill. 

Lewis is referring to several famous passages on Nature from English letters--Tennyson, Wordsworth, Darwin, etc. Yet nearby this paragraph, he refers to Langland, Bernardus Silvester, Chaucer, Aristotle, Plato, Euripides, Addison, Milton, Spenser, and others. What strikes me is that Lewis is writing in a day without Google Scholar and without library databases. He is probably sitting in the Bodleian as he writes this, but much of this is off the top of his head. 

The gulf between the modern "well-read" reader (such as an English prof) and a reader like Lewis is immense. I read Lewis in awe, but love to learn from him.

Neal Postman, who was not a Christian, makes some insightful reflections on the Bible's emphasis on verbal communication over image-based communication:

In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations.

 Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, p. 9

Douglas Groothius:

The medium of communication matters since it always shapes the messages it carries, and these mediated messages shape us. A novel and a television series based on a novel differ in crucial ways, for example. Therefore, any medium should be exegeted to determine its nature, function, and structure. Only in this way can we ascertain what it does well, what it cannot do, and what it does poorly. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by his hyperbolic slogan, “the medium is the message.” Taking his cue from the discussion of idolatry in Psalm 115, McLuhan also remarked that, “We become what we behold” (see also Ps. 1). When we become habituated to a particular form of communication, our mentalities and sensibilities bear its mark. . . .

When the image dominates the word, rational discourse ebbs. We are attracted to the incandescent screen just as medievals were attracted to stain glass windows; as McLuhan noted, the light comes through them as opposed to light being shown on them (as with books and photographs and other objects in the physical world). . . .

When the image overwhelms and subjugates the word, the ability to think, write, and communicate in a linear and logical fashion is undermined. Television’s images have their immediate effect on us, but that effect is seldom to cause us to pursue their truth or falsity. Television’s images are usually shorn of their overall context and meaning, and are reduced to factoids (at best). Ideas located within a historical and logical setting are replaced by impressions, emotions, and stimulations. While images communicate narrative stories and quantitative information well (such as graphs and charts), words are required for more linear and logical communication. Propositions and beliefs can be true or false; images in themselves do not have truth value. The persuasiveness of the image on television led media theorist Tony Schwartz to claim that truth is now an outmoded concept, since it belongs to a time when print communication was dominant.

. . .  

The triumph of the televised image over the word contributes to the depthlessness of postmodern sensibilities. Reality becomes the image, whether or not that image corresponds to any objective state of affairs — and we are not challenged to engage in this analysis. ... As a consequence of such nonactivity, truth suffers, and truthfulness is downplayed if not ignored. Joshua Meyrowitch, a professor of communication, complains that his students “tend to have an image-based standard of truth. If I ask, ‘What evidence supports your view or contradicts it?’ they look at me as if I came from another planet.” This is because “It’s very foreign to them to think in terms of truth, logic, consistency and evidence. “Such oblivion exists not only in the case of media students, but is true of culture at large, as cultural critic Kenneth Myers stresses: “A culture that is rooted more in images than in words will find it increasingly difficult to sustain any broad commitment to any truth, since truth is an abstraction requiring language.” . . .

Muggeridge commented that when the Israelites worshipped the golden calf instead of waiting for the Word from Moses, they attempted to televise (or make visible) God. Biblically speaking, God commands that we not make graven images or attempt to televise the invisible. In the beginning was the Word, not the image (John 1:1). God gave us a book, and spoken word from incarnate preachers. When, in any culture, written language is marginalized by television, biblical truth begins to lose its vibrancy. Christians must restore the primacy and power of the Word as an antidote to truth decay by television.

From "People of the Word in a Culture of Images"