Osler's Razor

I'm a writer and a teacher. My life is defined by working with words. But sometimes words are a cage, or a clumsy wooden club.

There are things that are not well described by words, and there are ways that words twist and mold and change meaning. Words to describe joy, a good kiss, a bad fall, pain? Really? The English language is an 8-bit processor trying to depict an infinitely complicated creation of God. It fails, over and over, even in the most able hands.

There are times I have written about an experience--often here on the Razor-- and then gone back to re-read the post years later. The words are at best an invitation to the real memory, to the fully formed and subtle hued reality that I lived. But they are never fleshy enough to fill in the folds and curves of real lived life. There is always something left out, or made less important, or hidden behind a wall of verbiage.

And that is the problem with law, perhaps.

Law takes the endless complexities of human existence and tries to mash it into the poorly-defined and too-large holes that language allows. We are so clumsy in defining actions and thoughts--conspiracy, felony-murder, possession--and arrogantly defend these "bright lines" as somehow rational when they are not.

And theology, too. Words to describe the divine?

Better, sometimes, that we observe in silence and see the whole and turn to someone we love and sigh with contentment.