Nature lored, and next to nature, artInarmed both hands before fire of lifeit sinks, and I'm ready > to depart.- Walter Landor, his seventy-fifth birthday, 18491The life of man is an exer-expanding circle, which, from a ringimperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to newand larger circles, and that without end...There is no outside, no enclosing no circumference to us.-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles, 184121. Landor or Missing VerseIn one of his last writings, Fne of Life, Richard Rorty makes a poignant, brief and devastating journey that leads from mention of his terminal illness, up to recognition of place and nnportance of poetry in culture. Poets (in sense of Bloom - the poets like Plato, Hegel, Marx, and Freud, as well as Milton or Blake) mvent for us lexicons, textures of life in which we inhabit. ' Textures of a full life, that opens to new lexicons, and becomes more varied, as we enrich ourselves when we make new friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human - farther removed from beasts - than those with poorer ones.4In tins context refer to first epigraph quoted above: epitaph that Landor wrote for himself, and that Rorty inserted into his text, with tire notable exception of first verse. That line, excluded by Rorty, reads: I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. It is easy to see why it was not included in poetic-philosophical epitaph of Roity.The new realities we can imagine, in process of shaping oui' lives, and be farther removed from beasts, are certainly worth effort, and that's why first line of Landor cannot appear in Roity's emotive text. The full life enrichment through strong poetry, enlightenment through fire of life, cannot be exercised appealing to haughty look of those who observe with disdain a foreign territory, but from effective embedding of those who are engaged in task of reshaping culture and hope.The fir e of life might be consumed and go out, and still we could be ready to depart. But that fire also is oriented, or so we may think, in direction of contributing to ever expanding we inhabit. The figure of circle, as m second epigraph that opens this text, does not denote here idea of an area surrounded by a limit, beyond which lies ineffable, ominous reality that cannot be captured by appearances. There is no outside, no enclosing wall, says Emerson, quoted by Rorty in Pragmatism and Romanticism.5 This figure implies all known Rortian references to spaces of malleable practices, to beliefs as habits of action, as networks of allusions and reverberations, that follow many and varied purposes inside frame of contingency of language.It also involves idea of an incremental space in articulation of meanings. Like a tree that adds rings, we link habits, beliefs, desires, words, vocabularies, purposes, weaving and reweaving our practical orientations. It is a network that multiplies itself in webs, without assuming more than two tilings: a previous system of beliefs and desire to use old and emerging beliefs in response to new challenges.Landor's missing verse is one that cannot be in epitaph of that mimense re-weaver that was Rorty because in that line is discredited value of an effort to enlarge circle of life that we are constantly broadening, in pursuit of collective self-creation of a species. This little omission of Rorty in one of his last philosophical gestures serves to clarify my mam goal here: to emphasize that what we could call a Rortian pragmatics of language involves combination of two complex images. On one hand, image of constant re-weaving and widening of experiential circles, a sort of material, fallible and creative vision of culture and thought, and, on other, idea of a collective destination self-created and self-assigned, winch does not require joining or connecting with something eminently non-human. …