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TOWARD THE END of As You Like It, Orlando says: "I can live no longer by thinking. " He is ready to marry Rosalind. It is time for incarnation. Having thought too much, he is at one of the limits of human experience, or of human sanity. If his love does put on flesh, we know he must sooner or later arrive at the opposite limit, at which he will say, "I can live no longer without thinking. " Thought-even consciousness-seems to live between these limits: the abstract and the particular, the word and the flesh.
All public movements of thought quickly produce a language that works as a code, useless to the extent that it is abstract. It is readily evident, for example, that you can't conduct a relationship with another person in terms of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement or the women's movement-as useful as those rhetorics may initially have been to personal relationships.