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As in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in life the seer should watch the pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that alone. Thomas Hardy
To become red in the face (usually from shame or modesty). Five letters. Quick Crossword
Oops! Traditional
The Occasion
The ‘haitch’, reverberating in your immediate memory, ignited a blush that spread to the roots of your hair. You squirmed, sweated, sat puddled in shame. Nobody noticeably noticed; from which you inferred that everyone did.
How can I help you? My natural instinct is to shrink the small accident of your embarrassment by locating it on a larger canvas — the greater accidents of History, of Prehistory, and of Evolution — until pinkness fades in a widening astonishment, like the focal crimson of dawn in the edgeless hours of daylight. Since a natural instinct is one that naturals like me naturally give way to, I shall therefore play Goethe's Epimetheus — one who ‘traces the quick instant to the dim realm of form-combining possibilities’; remind you of the remote aquafers of consciousness from which your blush ultimately draws its pinkness; drill to the antique darkness where it has its roots.
Getting to the root of that blush means climbing down many storeys and telling many stories. There are worse occasions for a ladderless speleology of human awareness than a spelling out that spelt out more than you intended; that spelt out yourself as much as that word beginning with ‘haitch’.
Let us start at the bottom of our descent.
Speech
In the beginning there was speech.
When that beginning was, no one knows. The unspokenness of the material world, and of the experiences of the sentient beasts in it, ended perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps several hundred thousand, years ago. Nobody knows how it came about that speech broke into the wordless universe, though there have been many theories. None of these comes near to crossing the gap between the calls of animals and the discourse of humans. Few of the theories even see the size of that gap. Let us try at least to measure it.
Many things have meaning...