“But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, to take us beyond the words to the author’s very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds. Once the words have cooled and been reaffixed to the page as signs, their very power to protect us far away from themselves makes it impossible for us to believe that are the source of so many thoughts. Nevertheless, while we were reading, it is these words which spoke to us, suspended in the movement of our eyes and our feelings, which they in turn carried and projected unerringly when they rejoined in us the blind man and the paralytic, when they, thanks to us, and we thanks to them, became speech rather than language, and in the same instant became a voice and its echo.”
(The Prose of the World, second emphasis mine)
http://www.janushead.org/8-2/lingis.pdf
I know (knew) Lingis only through his Levinas translations.
. . . The I arises in an awakening, out of the drowsy murmur of sensations. It especially requires an active forgetting of lapses, failures, and chagrins—which persist as cloying sensations that mire down your view into the past and into the open path ahead. There is a fundamental innocence in the I, which stands in the now, and from this clearing turns to the time ahead and the time passed. To say “I” is to commence. “Now I see!” “I will go!” There is youth and adventure in the voice that says “I.” . . .
Wonderful stuff, dmf (?). Many thanks!
my pleasure, I’m really enjoying your blog, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
-Dirk/dmf