Hamlet said it with feeling: Words, words, words

You know how when you stare at a word for long or keep reading it over and over again it loses all meaning? Psychologists call it semantic satiation. Then there is wordnesia. That is when you go blank

You know how when you stare at a word for long or keep reading it over and over again it loses all meaning? Psychologists call it semantic satiation. Then there is wordnesia. That is when you go blank on the spelling or meaning of a common word. Sometimes the two come together, and you forget who you are, what you are doing on earth and why you were put here in the first place.

There is something about filling out the forms ahead of boarding a flight back to India to entertain such philosophical doubts. You have to get it right or you will remain where you are — in London, in my case — like a fly trapped in a bottle.

The aim of philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein told us, is “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” So is the aim of form-filling. This is travel in the time of COVID.