“Words are not the things they name: they are the bridges we extend between things and ourselves. The poet is the conscience of the words, that is, the nostalgia for the actual reality of things. True, words were also things before they were the names of things. They were things in the myth of the innocent poet, that is, before language, the glimpsed paradisal accord. Innocent speech: silence in which nothing is said because everything is said, everything is saying itself. The poet’s language feeds upon that silence which is innocent speech.”
Octavio Paz, Unknown to Himself
Time's Flow Stemmed 
This is from Paz’s introduction to Carcanet’s Centenary Pessoa.
Pingback: Words are not the things they name | synthetic zero
How utterly transcendent. I would say that words always and entirely conform to the objects they name, but it is in denial if this fact that we find reality.
This reminds me of the nominalist musings of the young Törless in Musil. Great blog btw.
Thanks very much. I’ve yet to get to Young Torless. One day.