The world is stuffed with public philistines and private romantics, and also people who are one or the other at different times of day, but never simultaneously. Integrating the concrete, the practical and the meaningful is impossible if one wishes to protect meaning from the “defilement” of explicit language, or if one has no persistent sense of meaning at all, nor any expectation that meaning ought to exist (which is already a sense of meaning).

Anyone who wishes to integrate the concrete, the practical and the meaningful will find himself caught in a strange kind of cross-fire between philistines and romantics, sympathizing with aspects of both, but disagreeing with the one point where the two sides vehemently agree: that communion is neither possible nor desirable.