I used to ride my bike, first down to the Connecticut River, then up the continuous hill from this glacial-age river valley up through Norwich, along Main Street, up Turnpike Road as the pavement stopped and gravel took over, past hundred-year-old orchards, along the path carved by the Blood Brook.
I was on my way to the trailhead to park my bike, then up the trail to the fire tower on Gile Mountain. There was a hand-painted sign partway up the road—just a board painted white with big black letters saying: THIS IS THE PLACE.
I liked its self-reflexive declaration—of thisness, of existence, of definitiveness, of hereness, and of the power of words to create. Was it that the sign marked a place? This would be one interpretation, of a simpler semiotics in which words are signs. But what place was “this”? It was “the place” the words called into being.
This blog will be a place to collect fragments of thinking about words and things born of words, like places, in words.
“Civilization is a word,” Sam Harris says, “predicated on the meanings of other words” (Waking Up App, “The Necessity of Thought”).