Meep Meep!

Sigh— I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them—and I hardly know any more when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird. — Nietzsche, The Gay Science Words are the seducers of philosophers; they struggle in the nets of language. — Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78) My own case is less flattering. Words may be nets, but I am as likely to be found hanging upside down in one of them as to have captured anything. If I am a hunter of insights, I am closer to Elmer Fudd or Wile E. Coyote: forever creeping after the same prey with some new weapon of language, only to have the trap close on my own foot, or the shotgun blast rearrange the quarry’s beak for three seconds before it snaps back into place. Perhaps I have never been…