View Excerpt from City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, Vol 1)
I had come across this quoted text on a page from an old binder of mine, (recycling contents and placing applicable links on my wiki) but after linking there found that the text is semi-random. So I Google’d it and found another copy here.
Thought provoking. Hope you enjoy.
“City of Glass” P94
Old man Stillman explaining why he wanders around all day collecting junk from the streets of New York and renaming them:
“…For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet, our words have remained the same…But words, you understand, are capable of change…when you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella?…Because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella…The word however has remained the same.
Therefore, it can no longer express the thing. It is imprecise; it is false; it hides the thing it is supposed to reveal. And if we cannot even name a common, everyday object that we hold in our hands, how can we expect to speak of the things that truly concern us?”
