“Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded. “But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one flows back into the other, and the two melt together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes. “I sometimes feel as though we’ve stumbled on a flaw in the system, don’t you? A short circuit? A category error? A strange loop? Is it possible that
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