An idiolect. That’s what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He’s been too blithe, he’d forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

Words were stories in themselves.

..even language is a kind of muteness, that everything is at an irrevocable distance; it made him wish to cross incomprehensible farnesses and yet simultaneously know he couldn’t, he was hobbled, shackled. It was the nature of things, we are all shackled, hobbled.

A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.

Words are themselves organisms, ...