Talk talk talk, words words words

Talking's a start, as I was saying, and it's way better than not talking.

Language and communication lifted our species from brute existence, created culture, and invented philosophy which, as James said, is "essentially talkative and explicit" -- hence our need for poetry, a form of verbalism that does its work, conveys its meaning, more by implication and ostension than explication. We must talk, but we must never forget that there's more to life than talking. There's much that cannot be explicated but should be noted and appreciated and assimilated.

And that's why I'd amend the statement "Philosophers can explain..." with: good philosophers know they can't explain everything.

"What an awful trade that of professor is," James complained at term's end in 1892, "paid to talk, talk, talk!... It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." Richard Ford's character Frank Bascombe expanded on the same theme: "Real mystery the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book, was to them [his teaching colleagues] a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away; live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble..."

That's how I put it twenty years ago, with the borrowed words of my favorite novelist and favorite philosopher. Look at me now, still talking. I didn't retire at 32. I'm approaching Ford's age of resumption.

But I'm also still talking about talking's limitations, still parroting James's talk on the subject. "I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what... exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization. As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field."

Intellectualism talks too much. That's why I'm still walking.

Sometimes I walk and talk, when in a peripatetic-classroom situation. Sometimes I walk and think, when ambling solo or (more typically) with the dogs. And sometimes I just walk.

"The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception," is pure gold. Like happiness and health, it's better than all the 'truths' under the firmament.