Please permit me to rant. Just a little.
A word is a pretty nonchalant string of symbols. Every word I type, right now, is just a collection of pixels, temporarily decorating a screen. If that were all a word was, a word wouldn't amount to much.
It's easy to forget the function of a word. It's easy to forget the purpose of language. When you get right down to it, our lives--the lives of every organism with a complex enough nervous system--amounts to a collection of abstractions. Of little, shapeless notions. These things are impossible to describe with precise language, because they are not freaking precise. They're messy. They're crazy. They're contradictory as all hell.
So we don't describe them. We link them, in our heads, to symbols. To letters and words. And when one person links enough concepts to enough words, and decides to mash them together, something magical happen: the essence of conscience, abstraction, is transmitted.
The ridiculous and outlandish notions of a little human can be felt by another. From mind to mind.
Across oceans, deserts, and even time, indescribable little nodules of linked perceptions and feelings can reach... you. You, right now, in your swivel chair, can know what Aristotle thought and felt, thousands of years ago. You can kick back and hang out with Carl Sagan, Alfred Hitchcock, and Teddy Roosevelt.
You think one man made your computer? One generation? Storing ideas, utilizing them, building off of them even as you write down your own accomplishments, is the greatest, most beautiful thing about our species.
It's what let us win the evolutionary arms race. It's what got us to the Moon. And it is definitively impossible to say when we're going to stop, when the great collective historical subconscious will stop. It's not clear if it ever will stop.
The transmission of ideas through language. It kicks all kinds of ass. It's our answer to oblivion.
I think it's goddamn beautiful.
