The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

“It is one of the classic conundrums,” Ha continued. “Language doesn’t just allow us to describe the world as it exists: It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider. Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become. Imagining what is not there is the key to our creativity. It is what no non-linguistic animal has. With that power, we are so much freer to act in new ways—to innovate, to invent, to view our situations from a thousand angles and find a new way out. But we can also come up with a thousand absurdities, out of line with the truth. And out of line with the brute fact of our awareness of being here. But that awareness of being here is consciousness itself. It is the evidence.