On Saturday evening, meeting Louis, a young professor freshly graduated from Cambridge, and Marta, a brilliant English student of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries French literature, turned into a beautiful surprise: a conversation where the books, authors and sentences that accompany us quite naturally found their way to the table.
As we talked, each of us brought in our readings, our questions, our moments of wonder, and it became clear how much thought feeds on those moments when it is shared with others.
It was Louis who, at some point in the conversation, wanted to bring back a quotation. It slipped away from him a little, could be approached but not completely grasped, and that is precisely what moved me. What escaped in the quotation, rather than a mechanical recitation, opened up a real space for questioning the place of words in what we call “thinking”.
All the more so since it was: “It is in words that we think.” Hegel.
This sentence kept working in me after the evening, as an echo of what we had just experienced: a thought woven in dialogue, clarified in spoken exchange, shifting as words circulate between us. In searching with Louis for Hegel’s exact wording, we were in fact experiencing this idea: words do not merely express thought, they bring it into being, with all their hesitations, approximations and unexpected findings.
It is from this attempt at an “almost” recovered quotation, and from the joy of that evening, that the desire to write these few lines emerged today.