Righting the Balance: Olson's The Distances

We have lived long in a generalizing time, at least since 450 BC. And it has had its effects on the best of men, on the best of things. Logos, or discourse, for example, has, in that time, so worked its abstractions into our concept and use of language that language's other function, speech, seems so in need of restoration that several of us got back to hieroglyphs or to ideograms to right the balance. (The distinction here is between language as act of the instant and language as the act of thought about the instant.) [HU, 3-4]