the power of words

If somebody says it's so, it's so.  Just like my rant about religion, here we go again.  Words create our reality.  And how about Jonathan Franzen's reality today?  I remember when I sat around a table at Columbia, all of us looking to him, our esteemed adjunct instructor, to guide us into the world of invented realities.  He was tall, sometimes grumpy, hard to impress, and passionate.  So passionate, in fact, that he made us graduate students a chart showing how, exactly, to conjugate "to lie."  It's a hand drawn gem that I still, occasionally, refer to.  If he is the great American novelist of our generation, does that mean my kids can auction that little chart for a bundle of money at Sotheby's in about forty years?