I got lost and IT remained
We were talking about mental age.
How very commonly we hear it remarked, that such and such thoughts are beyond the compass of words! I do not believe that any thought, properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather, that where difficulty in expression is experienced, there is, in the intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or of method.
For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it :: as I have before observed, the thought is logicalized by the effort at (written) expression.
There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language. I use the word fancies at random, and merely because I must use some word; but the idea commonly attached to the term is not even remotely applicable to the shadows of shadows in question. They seem to me rather psychal than intellectual. They arise in the soul (alas, how rarely!) only at its epochs of most intense tranquillity–when the bodily and mental health are in perfection– and at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams. I am aware of these “fancies” only when I am upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so. I have satisfied myself that this condition exists but for an inappreciable point of time–yet it is crowded with these “shadows of shadows;” and for absolute thought there is demanded time’s endurance. [ Edgar Allan Poe, "Marginalia - Part V" ]
I always loved the album “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” by Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson. But when I was reading the orginal Poe (whose snippets from above is uttered in Orson Welles deep resonating voice in the album) I was transfixed by a sense of incredulity. Who was this man Poe? It came to me that he is my mirror image. Only the mirror is the nth one in the progression of images produced by two parallel mirrors.
