Oh, am I stupid

My words wrestle well and have meaning in themselves alone. They have nothing to do with the world.

Oh, am I stupid! I just had to laugh heartily when I suddenly realised my stupidity. I caught my brain linking things that can’t be linked. This is commonly called a mistake. My brain (like everyone’s?) is constantly making connections between things. This sometimes makes sense, for example when I put words in the ‘right’ order. So that the words make sense – or at least sound good. But often enough, my words may sound good, but they don’t really make sense because they can’t be linked to the world.

And this leads to the answer to the first question, which is: Are euphonious words always true? The answer, there should be general agreement, is – no. Words don’t have to be true, even if they sound nice. Everyone has certainly experienced this, at least since the invention of advertising.

The second question, however, is much more difficult to answer and I would be very interested in other perspectives: What about true words? Do true words always have to be beautiful? To examine this question, we must first define more precisely what is meant by ‘beautiful’ here. Beautiful not from the perspective of the moment, because true words are often terrifying. One would not actually expect beauty to be frightening. So beauty here must mean the beauty that emanates from a true sentence when the sentence is uttered in a historical context, far removed from any emotional closeness.

Emotional closeness, as I said, can be frightening.

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