The philosopher Bryan Magee writes that ‘whenever I see, all that language can do is to indicate with the utmost generality and in the broadest and crudest of terms what it is that I see’: Even something as simple and everyday as the sight of a towel dropped on to the bathroom floor is inaccessible to language – and inaccessible to it from many points of view at the same time: no words to describe the shape it has fallen into, no words to describe the degrees of shading in its colours, no words to describe the differentials of shadow in its folds, no words to describe its spatial relationships
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