No urge is more human than the urge to express ourselves. We are hardwired to tell stories: our first stories appeared in the form of magnificent cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago.
The ancient Greeks told epic stories to memorialize great heroes ; Native Americans told stories to explain the origins of the world. Today we tell stories on front porches and bus stops, in newspapers and on national public radio. More than love and be loved, humans want one thing: to be seen and be heard.
Language is how we accomplish the extraordinary feat of understanding and being understood. When we impose order on the clutter of our thoughts, when we fit nebulous notions into clearly defined semantic categories and arrange them in comprehensible sentence structures, we can reveal the hidden depths of our souls.
Words make it possible to bridge the gap between ourselves and other people. The most profound experiences are beyond words. How can words ever communicate the colossal grief of losing our mother? Not only are the difficult things hard to describe, the beautiful things are as well. The simple pleasure of waking up on a frost-bitten morning to find our lover still warm wrapped in our arms, the enormous relief we feel when βafter missing for a few hoursβ our lost dog returns home.
Joy and bliss, catastrophe and crisis: all are ineffable. They then choose a passage that was formative to their development as writers. The result? The tragic irony of being able to speak, he realizes, is the things we most need to express our beyond our capacities:. Because there will always be a rift between what we want to say and our actual words. Ultimately, man is as multi-dimensional as a Russian nesting doll: he says one thing but means another, he projects an outward persona but conceals his inner self.
