Michael Dickmann: Here's what the story is. There was this little tadpole and a fish that grew up in a pond, and they were always intensely curious about life outside the pond. And then, eventually, the tadpole grows into a frog and discovers that, because he's an amphibian, he can go out and see what life is like. So…
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us…
Contrast two answers to the question, Why do we like certain tunes? Because they have certain structural features. Because they resemble other tunes we like. The first answer has to do with the laws and rules that make tunes pleasant. In language, we know some laws for sentences; that is, we know the forms sentences…