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Noam sat at his desk, where he was trying to write in his overpriced yet very high-quality notebook, but all he could do was stare out the window. Something was missing in his life. He had spent decades and decades sharing his thoughts with the world on all sorts of topics, but there still was something incomplete. He thought back to 1965; he had just published Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. He smiled, thinking about how great it was to move on from behaviorism. Out of everything in that book, the thing that stuck with him the most was Universal Grammar.
For all the years that Noam sang the praises of Universal Grammar, he never was able to make a real connection with it. He knew it existed. Deep down, everyone had it. But he never could truly understand what it was. All he knew was that it was completely concealed by arbitrary words. Universal Grammar doesn't know what a cat or a חתול is. It's all irrelevant. All it knows is the purest idea of language, the very foundation on which all of the world's languages are based, and nothing of the worldliness of those languages.
Noam leaned back in his chair. He placed his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. At first, his mind was racing with thoughts; he recalled a student in one of his classes struggling with an assignment. He had helped him earlier in the day, but still wondered if he fully understood what was being taught. He decided not to interact with that thought any further. More thoughts entered: the dirty laundry piling up, the beautiful Arizona desert, late stage capitalism. He let them dissipate. His mind needed to be as empty as possible to find what he wanted.
As the minutes or hours passed, the thoughts trickled away until there were none left. There was only nothing. There were no words. Only nothing. Not even objects. Not even colors. There was nothing. Noam was falling and standing on nothing. His arms and legs futilely flailed, but there were no arms or legs. He felt his mouth open, the air and vocal folds moving, but no words could be summoned. Noam glanced around, trying to find something, absolutely anything, but there was nothing. He wanted to explain what he saw to himself, try to even somewhat grasp what he had uncovered, but it was inconceivable. All he could possibly experience was nothing. His attempt at words became an attempt at a scream, but no matter how raw he felt his vocal folds becoming, he knew that it was all an illusion, no sound would be produced, and his vocal folds didn't actually exist. It was only out of habit that he ever thought they would.