ABSTRACT
The world contains my body. My body contains me. I contain my world. Where then is the world
and where am I in it if it also is in me? The old man in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing who
speaks in the epigraph above has understood that the unit of analysis for understanding how it is
that the worlds of human beings are meaningful worlds – worlds literally made of meanings – is
not the individual in isolation nor the world apart from the individual with which he interacts,
but both in serial dialogic transaction. The world contains me and I am a world containing it, and together each expands or constricts the other.
