The words are faster than the
facts to which they refer.
For this reason, they go farther
than them and generate new facts than those which they were meant to be
described.
The facts go slowly to the point
whence they become able to be appropriate subject matters for a discussion.
They firstly provide an image about which we can discuss by exploring their
most visible shapes, since the words as forms of speaking are closer to the forms
of some objects than to their content.
The dead objects provide easier and
faster such an image and thus the sciences of lifeless objects can grasp the
forms of their objects through a formal or precise language.
Differently, a living object as a
human being provides a definite image only when it dies. The memories of our
known dead persons are supported by a few images and our words about them
borrow the sobriety of a scientific discourse: the obituaries try to follow scientifically
the shapes we meet in those images.
However, the dead persons have
the reputation of haunting the living ones in their dreams or through sudden
memories. In such encounters, they cannot be subject matters of our words any
longer, but only causes of fear or sorrow. They act so in virtue of the same
revelation of their forms. Once we knew about them that they had a certain
form, we know that they were different from us and our words. Therefore, we
feel the fear of being close to a strange reality or the sorrow of finding that
we are totally different from it.
Though in the words related to
sexual desire we also use to see the males or females according to their forms,
the humans limited to their bodily forms are creations of our sexual words. They
cause us fears of being close to a strange reality only when they affirm their
own personality. They do this when they start to talk to us about themselves or
about their feelings for us. Therefore, the words of love we uttered or heard in
a love affair seem strange when we are not involved into it any longer. As long
as we are involved, it cannot be grasped a clear image of our lovers.
