'We talk' he (Goethe) wrote in middle life, 'far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I'd like to say in sketches. This fig tree, that little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future - all these are momentous signitures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there id domething futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature an her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted , before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.' We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficieries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic lable or explanatory abstraction.

The Door s of Perception - Aldous Huxley