At the Wembley Hilton

Bar writing in my Moleskine. After a long day of academic excellence, I feel the need to move into less formal territory. Yet every time I do this on Rawls & Me, I grow uncertain about what language can actually express.

It must have been in Kenmare, on the west coast of Ireland – my first real encounter with incommensurability, the unsettling idea that language cannot always bridge our metaphysical divides. As if there are fundamental ontological building blocks that we simply do not share. As a Christian, I can perhaps accept a fractured epistemology; I can live with the thought that our knowledge is partial and clouded. But the suggestion that the underlying experience of reality itself could differ so radically between people, especially between those who love each other, feels harder to bear.

Sitting here now, much later, I still sense that it was not primarily about the words. Words can always be chosen more carefully. It was rather that no matter what I might have said, communication would have failed. Accepting that possibility opens a rift that is difficult to close. For if this is true, then people who seem deeply in love can be separated not only by circumstance or egoism, but by metaphysics.