from The Book of Disquiet:
Their inability to say what they see or think is a cause of suffering to most people. They say there is nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; it's necessary, they say, to describe it in the air, with one's illiterate hands, using gestures, spiralling slowly upwards, to show how that abstract form, peculiar to coiled springs and certain staircases, appears to the eye. But, as long as we remember that to speak means to renew language, we should have no difficulty whatsoever in describing a spiral: it is a circle that rises upwards but never closes upon itself. I know perfectly well that most people would not define it thus, because they imagine that to define something one should say what other people want, and not what one needs to say in order to produce a definition. I would go further: a spiral is a virtual circle which repeats itself as it rises but never reaches fulfilment. But, no, that's still abstract. If I make it concrete all will become clear: a spiral is a snake, which is not a snake, coiled vertically around nothing.
All literature consists of an effort to make life real. As everyone knows, even when they act as if they did not, in its physical reality, life is absolutely unreal; fields, cities, ideas are all totally fictitious, the children of our complex experience of ourselves. All impressions are uncommunicable unless we make literature of them. Children are naturally literary because they say what they feel and do not speak like someone who feels according to someone else's feelings. Once I heard a child on the point of tears say not 'I feel like crying', which is what an adult, i.e. a fool, would say, but: 'I feel like tears.' That child produced a fine definition of his particular spiral.
Mark Miller: Escher-esque
