Patterns and language

When you read "blue" do you think of the sky, or ocean, or copper sulfate, or maybe a little of all at once? The word's just a word, a few letters, a sound, but you use that abstraction to bring to mind all these things, from colored chalk to the spectrum to the rainbow to the refringence in a bubble.

Anecdotal Evidence introduced Nemerov and his Figures of Thought (also see this and I like The Spy ). In that "Figures of Thought" he describes discovery of patterns in disparate things as a "dry delight."

"Dry"? Those spirals he wrote of, like blue hues, inhabit much in the world that we sense. Like "blue", the word "spiral" evokes something from our senses. But it also evokes something from our minds, like "care" or "depth" do.

If you do not know the name, the language, you can still see the commonality when looking at something as obvious as the color blue or a spiral, but you'll miss things less obvious things like the commonality between a pendulum and a wave in the water.

Heinlein exaggerated, but just as you can't fully appreciate Chinese poetry without knowing the Chinese language, or fully understand some paintings without knowing the symbols the artist used, you won't fully appreciate the poems of the world without knowing the language of the world.

Life is short, and I don't have time for all I find to do. I'll never learn Chinese. I'll just have to worry along with translations.