words

To all thoughts of your or any one's mind, — to all yearnings, passions, love, hate, ennui, madness, desperation of men for women, and of women for men, — to all charging and surcharging, — that head which poises itself on your neck and is electric in the body beneath your head, or runs with the blood through your veins, or in those curious incredible miracles you call eyesight or hearing, — to all these, and the like of these, have been made words. Such are the words that are never new and never old.

What a history is folded, folded inward and inward again, in the single word I.

-- Walt Whitman An American Primer