i want to read this book.

i have to read this book.

to say that studies in philosophies of language have always interested me is only a statement of intellectual inclination. to say i'm passionately devoted to authors who approach their subject comparatively and with such breadth and erudition is merely a profession of personal ambition. they are true, but they are not why the description of this book has created such panic and horrified longing and clenching hurt.

the why of it has something to do with the complex and multilingual background that we have been shaped by - because i always was a whorfian - and has something to do with a conscious movement towards the polyglottal life. because an argument like this must trace the common trajectory of a post-colonial's linguistic experience, and because questions of language loss, muteness and speech, are, at this time more than at any other, ever-present in my mind. the subject of the book is all too terrifying and compelling in its nearness to personal experience, of the sensation of language loss, of languages written over each other, of slippages, of the terror of mutism, and of the fall which is not, as the trope goes, into language, but into silence.