The devil doesn’t promise you everything; he just makes you think that something is enough.
—Anon.
This is the end of the photo album. If, as sometimes happens with amateur photos, you see me reflected here and there in a mirror or worse, my hand in a picture, I hope you’ll forgive me and, above all, that this won’t have detracted from the intrinsic interest of the subjects. They are all still there, available for further photos. To tell the truth, innumerable snapshots didn’t find their way into this album: those of Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Alfred Tarski, Louis Hjemslev, Leonard Bloomfield, Otto Jespersen, Richard Montague, Richard Kayne, in primis. There’s only one person, however, of whom I thought no snapshot would ever be possible: I wouldn’t change even a comma of the first seven chapters of the first book of De vulgari eloquentia—but I don’t have Pierre Menard’s calling.
So this album isn’t complete, but the real question is whether an album whose subject is language could ever be. Sometimes language seems to slip away from our grasp the way the tortoise did from Achilles: every time we get closer to it, it seems to move a little further away. But it’s not in my nature to be discouraged. Perhaps we’ll never really catch this tortoise, but I’m convinced that we’ll get close enough to look it in the eyes.
