Words and wisdom

After a run I spent the morning reading Seneca: On the Shortness of Life, Consolation to Helvia and On Tranquility of Mind. I played some guitar in the afternoon and came up with the verse and chorus of a song that could work for Distant Signal. I'll pick it up tomorrow and see if there's anything there.

Something led me from Seneca to Edward Conze's translation of 'The Diamond Sutra', where I found this:

"Wisdom will use terms always in such a way that the original meaning is revealed. And men were wise long before they became clever. This linguistic correlate of Jung's collective unconscious is surely worthy of greater attention than it usually receives."

He goes on to quote I.A. Richards, Meaning of Meaning:

" No one who has used a dictionary - for other than orthographic reasons - can have escaped the shock of discovering how very far ahead of us our words are. How subtly they already record distinctions towards which our minds are still groping. If we could read this reflection of our minds aright, we might learn nearly as much about ourselves as we shall ever wish to know."

This is one of the reasons why poetry can have such an effect on us: it links words by their submerged part.