An Act of Will Is a Dream in the Daylight

An act of will is a dream in the daylight.  The conjunction 'if' can alter, recompose, put in radical doubt, even negate the universe as we choose to perceive it...To speak either to oneself or to another, is in the most naked, rigorous sense of that unfathomable banality, to invent, to re-invent being and the world.  Voiced truth is, ontologically and logically, 'true fiction', where the etymology of fiction directs us immediately to that of 'making.'...Above all else, language is a generator and messenger of and out of tomorrow.  In root distinction from the leaf, from the animal, man alone can construct and parse the grammar of hope.  he can speak, he can write about the morning light on the day after his funeral, or about the ordered peace of the galaxies a billion years after the extinction of the planet.  I believe that this capability to say and unsay all, to construct and deconstruct space and time, to beget and speak counter-factuals...makes man of man...We cannot imagine being, and imagining is, immediately, a semantic move, without discursive openness, without the potentiality of questioning even death.  Above the minimal vegetative plane, our lives depend on our capacity to speak hope, to entrust to if-clauses and futures our active dreams of change, of progress and deliverance...To such dreams, the concept of resurrection...is a natural grammatical augment.

          --George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), 55-56.