I think this is a worthy observation by William:
"images, consciousness, urges, inclinations, feelings, emotions, always
mingle with thought, shaping it, dissolving it,
merging."
I picture an engineer standing by the side of a river in a jungle-like part
of Burma, trying to decide the best place to build the bridge. He is "thinking"
like mad, but at that moment the "content" or "substance" of his thought is
not verbal at all -- though he may later be compelled to "put it into words".
I can't go along with William when he says, "When we say
thought, we're already into language since a thought
is only recognized as such when it becomes language."
Maybe this is true of Arendt's and Derek's "recognition", but it's not true
of mine. I just had a pertinent vignette with a friend. I recalled that once in
Bermuda I drove something I described to him as a "sissy's idea of a
motorcycle". I had trouble remembering what they called it, though I had vivid
memories of what it felt like and how it sounded. "Motor-ped?" I conjectured.
No, he
answered -- "moped".
As soon as he said it, I knew he was right. My notion was a thought though I
didn't yet have the language. I remarked earlier on one of the values of a
good thesaurus -- one that clusters not just "synonyms", but related words.
I've
often gone to my thesaurus with a thought, but groping for the word. "No --
not that. . .not that. . . There! That's the word!"
As a further instance of how miserable my visual "thinking" is next to
William's, I report that my visual recall of that moped is vague, fuzzy,
incomplete,
awful. When one has a gift, as William does, one's first inclination is to
assume everyone else has it too. It's only with the passing years that we come
to realize Mom can't do arithmetic in her head the way we can, but she can
recall the pattern on the wallpaper we both saw the other day. It's a startling
part of our education.
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