talked out

Thank goodness it’s Saturday, and I can shut up for a couple of days! A week of croaking and gasping through stressed vocal cords has me really feeling the truth of James’s complaint that it would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.”

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy.

A  “dumb region of the heart” may well be, as James said, our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things.”

But for those of us who don’t sign or read minds– (I loved the Tim McGraw line to Sandra Bullock in “Blind Side,” our family Friday flick last night: “Tell me what’s on your mind, so I’ll know what I’m supposed to think.”)–  communicating with people, in person, still requires vocalizing.

So if I’m going to vow silence for the weekend, it’d sure be nice to swap the conceptual shotgun for the POV gun. Give me that thing.

Tags: Blind Side, conceptual shotgun, Douglas Adams, empathy, Point of View gun