One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.
Interpretation
Language can be seen as a lifeless version of mythology, stripped of its vibrant essence.
Schelling suggests that language, while it serves as a vessel for mythological concepts, lacks the vitality and richness that original mythologies possess. In his view, language reduces the lively, dynamic nature of myth into a mere abstract representation, thereby losing the depth and experiential quality that makes mythology so powerful and engaging in its living form.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of storytelling, one might use this quote to emphasize how language can fail to capture the essence of lived experiences.
The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with vigour and ethical meaning.
He lived in chambers that had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.
Snow reminds Ka of God! But I’m not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow.
Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
I foresee a great funeral contest over me.
Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
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