Barfield: The making of meaning

Każdy porządny drogowskaz powinien od czasu do czasu chodzić drogą, którą wskazuje.

In this chapter I have taken only one English word and one no richer in itself than a thousand others. Yet it serves well enough to show how the man of today, overburdened with self-consciousness, lonely, insulated from Reality by his shadowy, abstract thoughts, and ever on the verge of the awful maelstrom of his own fantastic dreams, has among his other compensations these lovely ancestral words, embalming the souls of many poets dead and gone and the souls of many common men. If he is a poet, he may rise for a moment on Shakespeare's shoulders - if he is a lover, then, certainly, there are no more philtres, but he has his four magical black squiggles wherein the past is bottled, like an Arabian Genie, in the dark. Let him only find the secret, and there, lying on the page, their printed silence will be green with moss; it will crumble slowly even while it whispers with the thunder of primeval avalanches. 'Le mot', murmured Victor Hugo... 'tantot comme un passant mysterieeux de l'ame, tantot comme un polype noir de l'ocean pense....'

Owen Barfield, Poetic diction: A study in meaning.