a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.[/b]

So, anyone here not governed?

The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.

Nope, not yet.
That is still true, right?

Property is theft!

Until of course you own some.

When deeds speak, words are nothing.

Besides, what can go wrong?

Nevertheless, it is with the help of these metaphysical toys that governments have been established since the beginning of the world, and it is with their help that we shall come to resolve the enigma of politics, if we are willing to make the slightest effort to do so. I hope I will be forgiven, then, for labouring this point, as one does in teaching the rudiments of grammar to children.

Even if true, is it still farfetched?

As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.

Sounds about right. Only more or less in theory.

[b]Existential Comics

Everyone is obsessed with physical appearances, but remember: True beauty lies in your boundless, untamed fury at the absurdity of existence.[/b]

Of course that’s just common sense.

There are two ways to satisfy human wants: aquire more, or desire less. One of the two directions terminates at infinity.

Gee, I wonder which one?

Never forget, Capitalism is the reason women’s clothing doesn’t have pockets. If outfits were controlled by the people, it would be pockets for one and all.

Can this actually be true?

David Hume’s ideas were so stupid, but so hard to disprove, that everyone had to do philosophy for real just to shut him up, thus ushering in the modern age.

Can this actually be true?

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the unstoppable rising tide of socialism, which will sweep across the Earth and create a new world order.

If only [so far] in North Korea.

[b]Philosophy teaches us that there are five kinds of things:

  1. Platonic forms
  2. Numbers/dreams
  3. Things that don’t exist
  4. Rocks and insects and stuff
  5. Other[/b]

You know, technically.

[b]Robin Wasserman

Don’t go looking in dark places, because dark things live there.[/b]

Of course, for some, that’s the whole point.

If you can’t remember something, did it really happen?

Yes and no. Just to play it safe.

In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.

That’s all it takes, alright.

Life is a physics problem. Bodies in motion.

And emotions? Is that all physics too?

And you know what? If there is a God, and it’s that same God who’s so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can’t get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some.

Try that on Judgment Day.

You could love something and still understand it had ruined your life.

Not only that but again and again and again.

[b]Maurice Blanchot

We cannot do anything with an object that has no name.[/b]

Like calling it something will always make a difference.

To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog.

Does Schrödinger’s cat know this?

I went in; I closed the door. I sat down on the bed. Blackest space extended before me. I was not in this blackness, but at the edge of it, and I confess that it is terrifying. It is terrifying because there is something in it which scorns man and which man cannot endure without losing himself. But he must lose himself; and whoever resists will founder, and whoever goes forward will become this very blackness, this cold and dead and scornful thing in the very heart of which lives the infinite. This blackness stayed next to me, probably because of my fear: this fear was not the fear people know about, it did not break me, it did not pay any attention to me, but wandered around the room the way human things do. A great deal of patience is required if thought, when it has been driven down into the depths of the horrible, is to rise little by little and recognize us and look at us. But I still dreaded that look. A look is very different from what one might think, it has neither light nor expression nor force nor movement, it is silent, but from the heart of the strangeness its silence crosses worlds and the person who hears that silence is changed.

He’s right, you know. Whatever this means.

If the sculptor uses stone and if the road builder also uses stone, the first uses it in a way that it is not used, consumed, negated by usage, but affirmed, revealed in its obscurity, as a road that leads only to itself.

Why not both then?

Even death is a power, a capacity. It is not a simple event that will happen to me, an objective and observable fact; here my power to be will cease, here I will no longer be able to be here. But death, insofar as it belongs to me and belongs to me alone, since no one can die my death in my stead or in my place, makes of this non-possibility, this impending future of mine, this relation to myself always open until my end, yet another power. Dying, I can still die, this is our sign as man.

Somewhere in here there’s a real death. And, sooner or later, yours.

Art is not religion, it doesn’t even lead to religion. But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.

In other words, art in an essentially absurd and meaningless world.

[b]Simon Singh

The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world.[/b]

I know, let’s call it “national security”. Though, sure, “big brother” still works.

…like Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, the Navajo were ignored for decades. Eventually, in 1968, the Navajo code was declassified, and the following year the code talkers held their first reunion.

Hosted by Don Trump and Pocahantus.

…if a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed…

How worried should we be then?

Similarly, if you’re trying to prove something mathematically, it’s possible that no proof exists.

Indeed, we get that all the time here.

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Any youtube videos up yet?

Had the Arabs merely been familiar with the use of the mono-alphabetic substitution cipher, they would not warrant a significant mention in any history of cryptography. However, in addition to employing ciphers, the Arab scholars were also capable of destroying ciphers. They in fact invented cryptanalysis, the science of unscrambling a message without knowledge of the key. While the cryptographer develops new methods of secret writing, it is the cryptanalyst who struggles to find weaknesses in these methods in order to break into secret messages. Arabian cryptanalysts succeeded in finding a method for breaking the monoalphabetic substitution cipher, a cipher that had remained invulnerable for several centuries.

Let’s connect the dots here to ISIS. If, of course, it can be done.

[b]B.F. Skinner

A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he’s often sure he can find one. And that’s a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.[/b]

Not true at all. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

[b]Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The ‘ologies’ will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego.

Considering how long society has been at it, you’d expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.[/b]

Clearly, some conditioned responses are more effective than others.

It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.

My guess: they call it something else.

…not everyone is willing to defend a position of ‘not knowing.’ There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

I wonder if he’s talking about me?

The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.

And, as likely as not, only to stumble into another mob.

Going out of style isn’t a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year’s dress in order to make it worthless.

Capitalism. I mean, talk about conditioned responses!

[b]Philip Pullman

I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he’d see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I’d ever done…I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn’t. There is none.[/b]

For a few, something to shoot for.

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.

Cue the “compatibilists”?
No, seriously.

It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.

Indeed, maybe it is all just natural.

Can is not the same as must.
But if you must and you can, then there’s no excuse.

Please, don’t remind them.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.

Let’s pin down how profound this is.

Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

Okay, but what about the ones that see no difference?

[b]The Dead Author

Amazing how the Muslim ban, purchasing a gun for every family member, and armed guards at elementary schools have ended violence in America.[/b]

Nothing kicks in though until the swamp is drained.

That feeling when someone calls critical thinking a “skill” as if it meant fact checking, playing chess, or plumbing and not ethics.

I know what you’re thinking: Don’t get me started.

Nihilism is important for reminding us that not worrying won’t make you happy either.

Let’s just say I’ve known exceptions.

The beauty of postmodern English is that “depressed”, “depressing”, and “depressive” have come mean different things, none of which is “having depression”.

Let’s just say I’ve known exceptions.

Plato and Socrates are like Bruce Wayne and Batman, if Batman’s superpowers are pedophilia and logical fallacies.

How outraged should we be?

Socrates taught me that it’s ok to rather be dead.

If not on principle.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning.[/b]

I know. It’s parallel to mine.

Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning, on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born on have travelled all over the world. The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calender, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.

Sounds like something I’d say. You know, if I knew what it meant.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.

In that case, there must be three kinds of writing. And probalby a lot more.

The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off his body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don’t say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

It’s true that I’ve never met one that did.

Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another.

Not unless you synchronize your watches.

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates?

In other words, your guess is as good as mine.

[b]Mary Roach

Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy. The troubles began in Alexandrian Egypt, circa 300 B.C. King Ptolemy I was the first leader to deem it a-okay for medical types to cut open the dead for the purpose of figuring out how bodies work.[/b]

So he’s the one.

Constipation ran Elvis Presley’s life. Even his famous motto TCB— ‘Taking Care of Business’— sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.

He’s still The King though.

Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they’ve caught for their young.

Yet more proof that God is a fucking genuis. Or so I’ve been told.

You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

Indeed, how many can say that?

There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings—fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef—the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidney (as well as all ten vegetables, haddock, and pineapple), but brains and sweetbreads did not turn up among the low-preference foods she listed. And the most popular item of all? Bone marrow.

Let’s decide what this explains.

If you found this book in the New Age section of your local bookstore, it was grossly misshelved, and you should put it down at once. If you found it while browsing Gardening, or Boats and Ships, it was also misshelved, but you might enjoy it anyway.

This one: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

[b]John Cage

So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we’re overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We’ve gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?[/b]

Quite a jumble, isn’t it?

It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play’d be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.

Quite a jumble, isn’t it?

Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.

Oh, sure they are.

Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don’t ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?

Next up: the days of the week.

Nothing more then nothing can be said.
We make our lives by what we love.
Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big.
Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: I take all the tones there are, leave out he one’s I don’t want, and use all the others. Satie said: When I was young, people told me; you’ll see when you’re fifty years old. Now I’m fifty. I’ve seen nothing.
Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure.
It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.
All I know about method is that when I’m not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I’m working, it is quit clear I know nothing.

And that’s all before breakfast.

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.

Anyone else misunderstanding this?

[b]August Strindberg

…if you are afraid of loneliness, don’t get married…[/b]

Best to steer clear of everyone, he thought.

I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.

Of course: feeling ain’t doing.

Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.

In other words [as likely as not], way, way, way “in your head”.

Those who won’t accept evil never get anything good.

Let’s just say that some take it too far.

He saw the cause of his unhappiness in the family–the family as a social institution, which does not permit the child to become an independent individual at the proper time.

More to the point [for some], if at all.

A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.

Well, at least he’s civilized.

[b]Neil Gaiman

She’s realized the real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.[/b]

Or the author does.

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

Actually, at the time, I didn’t.

I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night. The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good.

If only this could go without saying.

There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.

Or, sure, three other things.

There are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.
They kill themselves, you mean? said Bod.
Indeed.
Does it work? Are they happier dead?
Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

And surely that includes here.

You’ll think this is a bit silly, but I’m a bit–well, I have a thing about birds.
What, a phobia?
Sort of.
Well, that’s the common term for an irrational fear of birds.
What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?

Are there rational reasons?

[b]God

You’re all unimaginably fucked.[/b]

Some up the ass, I suspect.

Anybody have any theories why I’m allowing Trump to continue? I’m curious Myself.

Uh, You’re not omnipotent?

Someone should do something maybe.

On the other hand, not everyone can do anything.

I’ve been doing fake news literally since Day One.

In other words, since the day He created Himself.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool Robert Mueller.

No, but you can fire him.
Well, God willing of course.

Well I, for one, am curious to see how this all turns out.

He means the tax vote no doubt.

[b]André Malraux

I’ve been very near death. And you can’t imagine the wild elation of those moments—it’s the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it—when one meets death face to face.[/b]

You know, in a perfect world.

The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forest, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men’s dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die.

On the other hand, that day may not come at all. So, whatever you do, don’t count on it.

No one can endure his own solitude.

Trust me: Some would not have it any other way.

If a man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?

For what one might ask.

The sons of torture victims make good terrorists.

A logic all its own as it were.

One cannot create an art that speaks to me when one has nothing to say.

Really, this works much the same way here too.

[b]Terry Pratchett

It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.[/b]

Of course this can mean practically anything.

People who didn’t need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn’t need people.

Let’s find the loophole.

Juliet’s version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.

And, nowadays, quite normal.

I don’t see what’s so terrific about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset cos’ they act like people, said Adam severely. Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.

Let’s file this one under, “uh-oh”.

Heaven has no taste.
And not one single sushi restaurant.

Nothing but McDonalds.

There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.

In Hollywood, for example.

[b]C.G. Jung

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.[/b]

As opposed to, say, living out your entire existence in an essentially absurd and meaningless world.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know.

Okay, okay: He says this with considerably more sophistication than I do.

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own.

Indeed, and whether writing them or reading them.

When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.

And lucky for you, right?

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

He means you, Mr. Objectivist.
Or I certainly do.

Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.

I’ll share mine if you’ll share yours.
You know, if you’ll go first.

[b]Joseph Heller

Be thankful you’re healthy.
Be bitter you’re not going to stay that way.
Be glad you’re even alive.
Be furious you’re going to die.[/b]

Repeat as necessary.

You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.

If nothing else, you catch them off guard.

He was like a man who had grown frozen with horror once and had never come completely unthawed.

I hear that.

And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways, Yossarian continued. There’s nothing mysterious about it, He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?

You wonder if this will ever be resolved.

He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order.

Come on, admit it: It might be true.

Last night in the latrine. Didn’t you whisper that we couldn’t punish you to that other dirty son of a bitch we don’t like? What’s his name?
Yossarian, sir, Lieutenant Scheisskopf said.
Yes, Yossarian. That’s right. Yossarian. Yossarian? Is that his name? Yossarian? What the hell kind of a name is Yossarian?
Lieutenant Scheisskopf had the facts at his finger tips. It’s Yossarian’s name, sir, he explained.

No, this is not just a military thing.

[b]Gautama Buddha

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?[/b]

Perhaps, but the worry of others may well be that you do.

There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people. It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.

In other words, not at all unlike the absense of doubt.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

Gee, that about covers everything, doesn’t it?

Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.

Okay, but what “on earth” does that mean?

You only lose what you cling to.

Unless, of course, you don’t let them take it.

Three things cannot hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.

If only in the either/or world.

[b]Robin Wasserman

The world was full of weapons, when you cared to look.[/b]

Also, when you cared to look, there were folks to use them on.

Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it’s neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I’d only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.

Or, as often as not, when you think that no one is watching.

Popularity gives you power only over people who care about being popular. Ostracism gives you power only over those who fear being ostracized.

Not counting all the times this makes no difference.

The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness.

Not to mention the other way around.

They were kids. Kids don’t care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade knedliky. It’s home. They didn’t notice the tanks in the backyard, the blood in the streets.

Same with the kids in Trumpworld no doubt.

That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else’s words in a voice that somehow was and wasn’t your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but—as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it—words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefore I am.

And all that this either does or does not imply.