"There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters"
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Barney is naming a paradox with a poet's knife: the most real things can be the least speakable, and what we call "reality" is often just what has found a translator. "Intangible realities" suggests not mysticism so much as the pre-verbal zone of feeling, desire, intuition, and social possibility - experiences that hover at the edge of perception because language hasn't caught up. They "float near us", hauntingly close, but "formless and without words": not nonexistent, just unshaped by the tools culture uses to make anything legible.
The sting is in the last clause. These realities are "excluded for lack of interpreters" - a quiet indictment of gatekeeping disguised as metaphysics. If no one can name an experience, institutions can pretend it doesn't count. Barney, writing as a queer modernist and salonniere in a period that treated certain lives as unspeakable, is arguing that absence in public discourse isn't proof of absence in the world; it's a failure of interpretation. Power decides what gets articulated, archived, and believed. The "interpreter" here isn't only a poet or philosopher but anyone who can convert the unsanctioned into the shareable: the lover who risks candor, the writer who invents a vocabulary, the community that makes a private sensation into a public fact.
It works because it's both airy and accusatory. The image of realities drifting "near us" flatters our sensitivity, then undercuts it with responsibility: if you want a wider world, someone has to do the translating.
The sting is in the last clause. These realities are "excluded for lack of interpreters" - a quiet indictment of gatekeeping disguised as metaphysics. If no one can name an experience, institutions can pretend it doesn't count. Barney, writing as a queer modernist and salonniere in a period that treated certain lives as unspeakable, is arguing that absence in public discourse isn't proof of absence in the world; it's a failure of interpretation. Power decides what gets articulated, archived, and believed. The "interpreter" here isn't only a poet or philosopher but anyone who can convert the unsanctioned into the shareable: the lover who risks candor, the writer who invents a vocabulary, the community that makes a private sensation into a public fact.
It works because it's both airy and accusatory. The image of realities drifting "near us" flatters our sensitivity, then undercuts it with responsibility: if you want a wider world, someone has to do the translating.
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| Topic | Deep |
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