«To lose faith in words, to find the words broken in general rather than here and there, is an unpleasant deconversion experience. Those who have undergone this crisis in faith—Heidegger, Korzybski, Wittgenstein, Garfinkel—often attempt to leave a record of it, swallowing the irony that they can only communicate using the now-distrusted words. Wittgenstein’s is the most cogent and least brain-melting; the others, and many like them, adopt new jargons, put all kinds of unfamiliar weight on parts of speech, multiply clauses, troll typographically with brackets and scare quotes, and wrap it all in puns, jokes, and absurdities. It seems to be difficult to go through this transition and remain sane, or retain the ability to articulate things in the usual way, if there is a difference between the two.»
