Writing more beautifully: When the language crumbles in the mouth

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Hugo von Hofmannsthal

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Imagno / Getty Images

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 

The letter of Lord Chandos

"My mind forced me to see all things that occurred in such a conversation in an uncanny proximity: just as I had once seen in a magnifying glass a piece of the skin of my little finger that looked like a flat field with furrows and hollows, This is how I felt with people and their actions. I was no longer able to grasp them with the simplistic look of habit. Everything fell into parts, the parts into parts again, and nothing could be encompassed with a concept . "

In 1958 Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest psychologists in cinema, made a film about a man who cannot distinguish between dream and reality.

A helical line can be seen on the poster for "Vertigo": a vortex that pulls the viewer into the abyss like a suction.

Vertigo means, literally translated, dizziness;

To be able to recognize something is always a question of standpoint, of perspective.

Today "Vertigo" is considered one of the best films of all time.

It is quite possible that the pull into the abyss is

 basic experience of modernity.

In 1902, when Hitchcock was just three years old, the Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal published a text about perception - about the dizziness that had seized him and with him throughout the ages.

"I have completely lost the ability to think or talk about anything coherently," he had a fictional Lord Chandos write, behind whom Hofmannsthal was unmistakably hiding himself.

He feels uncomfortable using terms like "spirit" or "soul".

The words no longer matched things, everything seemed to him "so unprovable, so lying, so holey".

Language no longer seemed capable of ordering the world. 

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