At the Wembley Hilton

Bar writing in my Moleskine. After a long day of academic excellence I feel like moving into some less formal territory. Every time I do this on Rawls & Me, I get uncertain about what language actually can express.

It must have been in Kenmare on the west coast of Ireland, my first real encounter with incommensurability, the idea that language simply cannot bridge our metaphysical divides. It is like there are those fundamental ontological building blocks and that we simply do not share them. As a Christian, I can maybe accept a fractured epistemology, but not that the underlying experience of reality could be so different between different people. Especially with those you love.

Sitting here now, much later, I still have this feeling that it was not so much the actual words, because they can always be chosen with greater care, but rather that no matter what I would have said back then, communication would have been impossible. Accepting that conclusion opens up a rift that is difficult to close. For if it is so then people deeply in love can not only be separated by unfortunate circumstances or egoism but also by metaphysics.