In speaking and in writing something mad occurs: the true conversation is a pure play of words. What’s amazing, in fact, is that people should make such a ridiculous mistake as to imagine they are speaking of things. Precisely what is most characteristic of language—that it attends only to itself—everybody ignores. As a result it is a wondrous and fruitful mystery—to the point that, if one speaks purely for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid, the most original truths. But if a person wishes to speak of some particular thing, that capricious creature language has him say the most ridiculous and muddle-headed of stuff. Which explains the hatred some serious people have for language. They see its mischievousness, but they don’t see that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If only one could have people understand that what applies to mathematical formulas applies to language too. They form a world apart, they play with each other, expressing only their own prodigious nature, which is precisely why they are so expressive—precisely why the strange play of relationships between things finds its reflection in them. Only by means of their freedom are they members of nature, and only in their free movements does the spirit of the world manifest itself and make itself the delicate measure and pattern of things. The same is true of language: he who has a subtle sense of its fingering, its timing, its musical spirit, he who intuits the delicate operation of its intimate nature, moving tongue or hand to it as he follows, he will be a prophet; conversely, he who knows this, but does not have the ear or the ability to write truths like these, will be mocked by language itself and derided by men, as was Cassandra by the Trojans. If in saying this I believe I have shown, in the clearest way possible, the essence and say it, so that no poetry has come out of it at all. But what if I felt compelled to speak? what if this linguistic impulse to speak were the hallmark of the inspiration of language, of the operation of language, in me? what if my will wanted only what I am compelled to do? might not this, in the end, without my realizing or imagining it, be poetry and make a mystery of language comprehensible? and would I then be a writer by vocation, since a writer can only be someone who is possessed by language?
--Novalis, "Monologue" qtd. in Calasso's Literature and the Gods, p. 191
