“This wide-spread idea that everything must be said and can be resolved by language, that every real problem is a topic for debate, that philosophy can be reduced to questions and answers, that one can only cure oneself by talking, that discourse is the only way of teaching anything, this theatrical, garrulous, publicity-seeking idea, lacking shame and modesty, is oblivious to the real presence of bread and wine, their unspoken taste and odour, it forgets how to raise infants through barely discernable gestures, about connivance and complicity, and things that go without saying, unspoken expressions of love, impossible intuitions that strike like lightning, the charm that lingers behind someone’s outward bearing; this judicial idea condemns the timid, those who are not always convinced of their own opinions and those who do not know what they think, researchers; this didactic idea excludes those who do not attend classes, humble folk, inventors, the hesitant and sensitive, men of intellect and labourers, the grief-stricken and the poor in spirit; I have known so many things without texts, so many people without grammar, children without lexicon, the elderly without vocabulary; I have lived so much in foreign lands, mute, terrified behind the curtain of languages, would I have really tasted life if all I had done was listen and speak?”

— Michel Serres, The Five Senses : A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies