Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
> Memory, longing, affection,
> wishing... there is nothing inherently incommunicable about these
> experiences, insofar as they are meaningful at all.
>
I really think this is wrong, and contradicts every human being's experience of trying to communicate any of these things. You can come up with a very poor approximation (in fact, not even that) of your memory, longing, affection, wish, and put it out there - 'communicate' it. But most of it is missing.
As an example - you could bless me with the verbal genius of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Nabokov, and I could spend the rest of my life trying, but there is no way I will ever communicate to anybody - not even in the slightest - my memory of the room where I loved so-and-so. Is this deprived of meaning because I cannot communicate it? Not to me (at this point should I anticipate some objection that meaning only exists between two or more subjects, and that communication is not anywhere near perfect? My objection still stands.)
Okay guys, you can go back to trashing each other now.
Eric Leher