If then, language does not reproduce experience with fidelity, to what does it owe its success in dealing with experience?
P.W. Bridgman, The Nature of Physical Theory
It [the integral] has at the same time been regarded by idealistic metaphysics as a manifestation that beyond the finitism of sensory percipiency there is trascendent infinite which can be but asymptotically approached by human experience and reason.
C.B. Boyer, The Hystory of Calculus
The words that are the most important are those that you never said, those written in the language that has existed for more than two hundred thousand years, long before any known human alphabet. You find them in the blank spaces between the lines of any good novel, they are that pain that is left once the last page is over.
They are the ones that Michael Ventris could never decipher: the very devotion and the dreaming love he spent on a tongue spelled a long time ago by mouths closed by soil that has become rock.
They are the definition of the constant of Euler, that number that tells the story of the attempt at drawing a curve, that is never close enough, like we can never say exactly what we meant or reach what we wanted. That number that best describes, better than any novel, the hopes without a sound when you are young and sick and your recovery is not going to happen, or even worse, it will happen when it won’t matter anymore. The desires desired between four walls.
I had never seen the ocean, I was afraid of what I would have found. And you know what I discovered? My observations have shown that all those words that you were never able to say, those that chase you like a vice, a bad habit that you can’t quit, they find their way out to the ocean, like migrant snakes, or rivers. Then, only here, all mixed up, they encounter the courage to release their load of anger, fear, love. But one over the other, in all the languages we have invented, they lose any hope of being understood and become a crowd that rapes its rage against the cliffs, without relief, over and over. And yet, this giant beast, this monument to all the mistakes we made, at the end becomes only a dog that licks your feet on the shore, still afraid, powerless.
I have collected a long list of words like those and you’ll never know them because they are hidden within the pages of the books you see closed in one of my drawings. And after all the dancing of graphite on the candid lake of paper, all the formulae cherished with the point of my pencil, what I really have been trying to say, what I meant was
paolo maccallini 