Language is a terrifying technology. Written language is perhaps even more severe, for it excludes the rhythm, character and music of speech.

It encourages our minds and experience to its likeness, and its likeness is crude indeed in comparison to those. Before long, we may discover we are only really ‘having’ the kinds of experience that fit into language.

We should not give up language — quite the opposite: clearly armed with a watchful and growing awareness of its failings and evasions, we must become its mystics.

Only in actual intimacy with it shall we discover and evade its pitfalls, just as we shall activate and share its treasures. But we must be able to recognize both, first.