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Friday, December 27, 2013

The Tower of Babel, Thomas Merton, 1940


History is a dialogue between forward and
backward
going inevitably forward by the misuse of
words.
Now the function of the word is:
To designate first the machine,
Then what the machine produces
Then what the machine destroys.
Words show us in these things not only in
order to mean them
But in order to provoke them
And to incorporate us in their forward movement:
Doing, making, destroy or rather
Being done, being made, being destroyed.
Such is history.

The forgotten principle is that the machine
Should always destroy the maker of the
machine
Being more important than the maker
Insofar as man is more important than God,
Words also reflect this principle
Though they are meant to conceal it.
From the ones who are too young to know.

Thus words have no essential meaning.
They are means of locomotion
From backward to forward
Along an infinite horizontal plane,
Created by the history which they
themselves destroy.
They are the makers of our only reality
The backward-forward working of the web
The movement into the web.

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