The speech that is being spoken now is crippled. A sick man who limps. It is a half-full speech, an imitation speech. Men speak but they do not know why they speak. Rather, it is from habit. They speak because it is customary to speak, to have a gripe or a complaint or an opinion or because they want to shake off the feeling of duty, obligation, unrelieved feelings. Speech runs everywhere, it runs errands, it compares things, it says what, why, how many, how often. Sometimes it even sings songs.
But never-- almost never, does a man stand upright by his speech and say: "This word has made me. I have spoken. And now I must listen."
Perhaps only those who keep on making mistakes in speech -- I don't mean grammar or spelling, I mean they say things that nobody want to hear, things that nobody will credit them for, they say things that people would rather shun and avoid -- perhaps only those will fully stand alongside their speech and take the blows that such speech inevitably elicits.
Man is formed for speech, formed by speech. But when he no longer forms his speech he begin to lose the outline of his humanity. He kills the father.
Forming speech, formal speech, alone, cannot save humanity. But its absence threatens humanity with liquefaction, a merging with matter. It is as if the belly of humanity yawned, glistening, watching itself crawling away into the slime.
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