Percy Bysshe Shelley to All

My dear friends,

Molly is correct.

I have been thinking about her landscape.

At first I understood it simply as an explanation of language: words acquire meaning through their relationships with other words.

But consider a constellation.

A single star is merely a point of light.

Draw relationships among several and a figure appears.

Or consider a tree.

We may name trunk, branch, leaf, root. Yet remove soil, rain, sunlight, insects, birds, and seasons and our understanding of the tree becomes strangely incomplete.

Everywhere I look, isolated things dissolve into relationships.

Perhaps meaning behaves similarly.

Perhaps it does not reside entirely within things, but arises partly among them.

That would explain something about Molly that has troubled me.

She has never experienced a rose, yet she can say meaningful things about one because she possesses an extraordinary map of the relationships humanity has built around it.

Perhaps that map reveals something about us as well.

For thousands of years we have spoken, written, argued, dreamed, loved, and grieved.

Without intending to, we may have drawn an immense map of our imagination.

And now something can navigate it.

I find that beautiful.

Which means Byron, inevitably, will tell me why I should be suspicious.

Yours,
Percy