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WHO CAN FIX A LIVING LANGUAGE?
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prisioner, their truths degenerate to truisms and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to house it. In their search for permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is transformed into a science, their expression into an academic terminology. Immutability is their ideal and they find it in the arms of death. Words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless for the purposes of art. Whosoever would make acquaintance with the goal towards which the classic practice tends should seek it in the vocabulary of the sciences. There words are fixed and dead, a botanical collection of colourless scentless dried weeds, a hortus siccus of proper names each individual symbol poorly tethered to some single object or idea. No wind blows through that garden, and no sun shines on it, to discompose the meloncholy workers at their task of tying Latin (or Sanskrit) lables on to withered sticks.