The beginning of naming is the end of knowing.
From Taking Everything into Account, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
A man stood under the sycamore this morning with a book of birds and looked up at me for a long while. Then he said sparrow, snapped the book shut, and walked on. I had been there since six. He never saw the way I hold my left foot, which is not how the other ones hold theirs. For years I thought a name was the door into a thing; the beginning of naming is the end of knowing, and I wrote that down with my foot still aching. Switch says nobody has ever named him anything and he gets looked at longer.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- A know-it-all doesn’t and doesn’t know that he doesn’t.
- We have learned so much about how to make a better world, but not learned enough.
- Call it what you will, it will be what it is.
- Life does not come with captions for a reason.
- History is a pendulum in the shape of a mallet.
- Pain has a long life but a short memory.