[b]Jeanette Winterson
The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.[/b]
Anyone here finally solved it? Not seriously of course.
What I want does exist if I dare to find it.
Right, keep telling yourself that.
[b]What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.
If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.[/b]
Like me, you probably never thought of that.
To say exactly what one means, even to one’s own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words.
Hmm. Perhaps that’s our problem here. Or, rather, one of them.
In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at until you understood them, they couldn’t change halfway through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.
Some words obviously more than others.
If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you.
Clearly, the shoe either fits here or it doesn’t.
If clearly is the right word.