Imagine that this essay began not with the sentence you’re reading, but with the following observation, attributed to Wittgenstein: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” A little oblique for an opening gambit, you might think, but presumably it will pay off shortly. Imagine further, however, that the Wittgenstein quotation was immediately followed by quotes from Simone Weil, the Upanishads and the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Petri. At this point, you might find yourself wondering, “O.K., when is the actual author going to actually give me something he actually wrote?”