There is a manner in which the person with greater access to language has a richer experience of reality. The generic “flower” unfolds into hundreds of different kinds one can read about and recognize in the wild. A person in one’s stories does not merely “walk,” but instead “saunters,” “trudges,” or any number of other interesting and descriptive ways of moving through the world.
On the other hand, our language—even the most highfalutin—remains crude and primitive. It’s easy for the linguistically sophisticated to become obsessed with finding ever more perfect words. But to be fully in the present moment is to find that words are entirely insufficient.
There is that splendid little turn of phrase that Oscar Wilde had about the cynic, the man who “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” This can at times apply to a person who becomes lost in words untethered from reality. With command of so many fine descriptions, he can lose sight of the real thing under his nose.
We should not forget that there are people for whom language does not come easily. Through the spiritual realm, they can still have a rich experience, one sometimes even more nuanced and developed than the person with fancy words. There is the person who through meditation comes to understand the person of God in ways that the academic must diligently study for a test.
There is also the depth in a relationship that is beyond our capacity for speech. We feel perhaps most readily with dogs and babies, those devoted companions incapable of talking. With his eyes and expressions, the baby conveys a multitude of longings and happinesses. These moments of deep and wordless connection can be a relief to the linguistically inclined, a chance to drink deeply of lived experience surpassing our weak ability to categorize and express.
With children, we are invited to play more with our experiences. We invent words and let forth ridiculous onomatopoeia. There are also the moments when words are simply not enough. When trying to describe to a child just how the Night Heron caught an insect scuttling across the road in the glow of a street lamp. Words prove inadequate and simply acting out the jab, pinch, and exaggerated swallow prove the only means to convey the sight.
How could we neglect to include in this brief meditation on the inadequacy of our words the immortal observations of Gustave Flaubert in “Madame Bovary”? He wrote, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” How true, how true…
