Here you go. You have clothed yourself in captivating, mesmerizing, irresistible words, Nabokov’s language making love to the poetry of Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot, edged so wittily it would make Dr. House green with envy. By now, you know them by heart, as you have razed these words to the ground only to rebuild them again more absolutely perfect. Therefore you head for that person you like (but only secretly), your dress of words rippling about you. You’ll only have to utter two phrases, and it will be ‘veni, vidi, vici’. When you open your mouth, however, the words cling to the back of your throat, frightened. ‘The people on the street blow so hard today that the wind is constantly falling down,’ you say, or something like that. In the best-case scenario.
One of the most ingenious devices the human race has come up with is language, if not the foremost. As children we are taught a meticulously detailed system of signs – our dresses or suits of words – so that we have the privilege to communicate with all people, your fellow students, your nephews and that stranger on the bus, about almost everything. Hurray, you will never have to feel alone on this overpopulated, overconsuming planet, because you can always babble on what you’ll be having for dinner this evening, the peculiar weather conditions, and there’s always cats as a thought-provoking subject.
One of the most failing devices the human race has come up with, however, is language. We are capable of going through the deepest feelings and sensory perceptions. Yet you will never be able to translate these rich sensations and thoughts crowded in your head into the words that come out of your mouth. Think of a moment someone or something has made your blood boil, and of your powerlessness to pour out the right words while you, reddened, blink back the uncontainable tears. Think of the most overwhelming feeling love, how you reach out for the one you love with all the words you have gathered into your language system, but how the words tumble down to the ground and you wish you had better not spoken at all. No wonder the cliché ‘I love you more than words could say’ has become so deep-rooted in our vocabulary.
Needless to say, this shortfall of language can always be rendered more beautifully in poetry. Contemplate a fragment of the English poet Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Buried Life’.
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!
But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb?
In society (‘the mass of men conceal’d’) we continuously lace our thoughts and feelings into airy words. How many times do you, in fact, enter into a real conversation? But it is the inarticulacy in the face of the one you wish to bare yourself to the core that is hardest to stomach. Linguistic communication always leaves the most important unsaid, and as soon as the other person – be it that one person you like or your lover for over seven years – starts speaking back, you feel something crucial slipping out of your hands.
We can count ourselves lucky today, altogether with our failing language, due to another of those ingenious devices of the human race. Technology. On top of all the scientific, military, medical, and daily-life opulence technology has endowed us with, we can delight in our new ways of social intercourse: e-mail, chat screens, telephone messages. Instead of facing the one you love in the open, you only need to get your hands on a telephone number, or even someone’s name will do, and you’ll become the new Gatsby and Daisy in the blink of an eye. We are freed of all the nerve-racking impediments of communication – the eyes, the awkward silences, the immediate need for answering -, so that we can take the plunge without anyone spying on us. Moreover, we have all the time and inspiration one can dream of to answer that cellphone/Facebook/Whats’App message, weighing every separate letter of your response while seasoning it with the right amount of wit, originality or warmth. We’re back at Nabokov having a threesome with Dickinson and Eliot.
However, when I was recently reading The Waves of Virginia Woolf, I underlined a certain passage (yes, I tend to underline mind-blowing, spellbinding quotations, in pencil, and yes, I have been scolded for it many a time) on page 7, where two youths in their summer love are speaking to each other. ‘But when we sit together, close, we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’ Not only are we able, throughout our chat screens, to melt into each other with perfect phrases, taking in each turn the rightly calculated step, we can craft such mind-blowing, spellbinding responses that our lovers will underline every one of them in pencil. But where’s the fun in that?
And what about the resolution Matthew Arnold has come up with in ‘The Buried Life’?
Only—but this is rare—
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
Yes, I am as dependent on technological communication as the average person, and I have made some of my best friends, or stayed in touch with friends far away, through our digital screens. Yet, like Arnold, I prefer the perils of language and real-life communication when love is concerned. I prefer going under in someone’s eyes and letting all my intentions slip, my dress of words tumbling down, leaving myself bare before those eyes. I prefer toiling, together with the one I love, with all the wrong words until we make an unsubstantial territory.
Let’s stumble into each other with phrases.
To Kill A Mocking Girl 
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Good thoughts! I wonder, however, whether an inability to intelligibly express love or any powerful emotion to someone else is so much a failure of words to communicate, as much as it is our own failure to clarify our own feelings to ourselves before ever trying to explain them to someone else. For example, most persuasive writing fails not because someone else didn’t comprehend our position (“I think capital punishment is wrong.”), but that we don’t comprehend it before we try to tell someone else about it. (Our position on capital punishment is so logically flawed that it cannot possibly be intelligently communicated to someone else.) Maybe the problem is not so much that other people can’t understand our feelings as much we don’t really understand our feelings ourselves so we are bad at expressing them in words.
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Hey Larry, thank you for your answer! I understand where you’re coming from, as deep feelings like love, hatred, or even the attempt to persuade someone, are sometimes sensations we cannot fully grasp ourselves. So I definitely get your point on that. I think, however, that the greatest struggle is not to make something of these feelings, as we all probably go through a phase of incomprehension, the moment we are experiencing these intricate emotions, but that we end up at a phase that we, most of the time, can comprehend these feelings, and that, at this phase, the greatest struggle is to translate them into language. The human mind is something complex to such a great extent that a system of arbitrary signs will never be adequate to tally with your emotions. In fact, we’re just speaking about two different stages, you about the inability of humans to make sense of our feelings, and I about the inability of language to make sense of these intricate feelings, as soon as humans have made sense of them. Very interesting matter, however, perhaps I’ll write a blog post about that one day. Or you, I’d look forward to read all about it.
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