But I couldn't help
saying to myself, What do you keep writing books for, when the stalls are
covered all over with 'em, good books, too, that nobody will give ten
cents apiece for, lying there like so many dead beasts of burden, of no
account except to strip off their hides? What is the use, I say? I have
made a book or two in my time, and I am making another that perhaps will
see the light one of these days. But if I had my life to live over again,
I think I should go in for silence, and get as near to Nirvana as I
could. This language is such a paltry tool! The handle of it cuts and
the blade doesn't. You muddle yourself by not knowing what you mean by a
word, and send out your unanswered riddles and rebuses to clear up other
people's difficulties. It always seems to me that talk is a ripple and
thought is a ground swell. A string of words, that mean pretty much
anything, helps you in a certain sense to get hold of a thought, just as
a string of syllables that mean nothing helps you to a word; but it's a
poor business, it's a poor business, and the more you study definition
the more you find out how poor it is. Do you know I sometimes think our
little entomological neighbor is doing a sounder business than we people
that make books about ourselves and our slippery abstractions? A man can
see the spots on a bug and count 'em, and tell what their color is, and
put another bug alongside of him and see whether the two are alike or
different.
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