It is demoralizing to disclose your mind-blowing, world transforming epiphany to someone who receives it merely as an opinion that they agree with, as if this is just another fact out there available to anyone who happens upon it. “Yeah, exactly.” Or for them to say that they had that exact same insight years ago.

In both cases they think they’re affirming the validity of the insight, but that affirmation is undermined by a denial of precisely what matters most about it: its ex nihilo irruption into the world as something profoundly new that changes everything.

It isn’t even a truth, and certainly not an objective truth. If you conceive what is being conveyed, it is a new subjectivity who leaves a comet trail of blinding truths against the void. It is a faith, reflected in a doctrinal sequin.

I’m constantly doing this to people. And I hate it when people do it to me.

Earlier this morning I was reading Heschel’s God in Search of Man. I think this post might be a response to what he said.

The function of descriptive words is to evoke an idea which we already possess in our minds, to evoke preconceived meanings. Indicative words have another function. What they call forth is not so much a memory but a response, ideas unheard of, meanings not fully realized before.