When, suddenly, instead of the world revolving around a person, a person becomes aware that the world is chaotic and impermanent. Anyone she knows or anything she owns can disappear: the world’s surface shimmers like a thin wall of water. The logical way to handle this is to intellectualize, rationalize, and anticipate the events of the world so that there are no surprises: to use language as if it can possibly stead what feels so tenuous and uncertain. But there’s nothing certain about language, just as there is nothing certain about where a person goes after he has disappeared.