235. The Limits Of Language

I’m standing before a great work of art, an unquestionable masterpiece. I cannot recall the name of the painting or the artist. I could read the small card beside the frame to get this information but it doesn’t matter right now. What matters is my experience of the artwork — the whole complex of perception and thought and feeling that constitutes what it is to see this painting.

That it is me seeing it cannot be ignored. For it is my own unique set of past experiences that shapes my present experience. No one will ever share this exact experience with me. Even the person standing next to me right now is not experiencing this painting in the same way, for my past experiences are not theirs and vice versa.

If I were to attempt to describe my experience, I would discover that I’m not able to do so. I could talk about the details I’m seeing — the lines, the shapes, the colours. I could talk about the careful juxtaposition of forms to create a composition with a sense of energy and completeness. I could talk about how the brushstrokes are in some places gentle and slight, while in other places they seem to betray an almost impossible weight. I could talk about how the painting creates an overpowering feeling inside me — a feeling of elevation and joy, a feeling that I’m now somehow more than I was before, a feeling that I have joined with the gods and am no longer a mere mortal.

I could go on and on like this for hours, talking about every imaginable aspect of my experience, and still I would never fully describe the experience itself. An unlimited number of words in any combination would still fail to capture the whole of it. The experience itself is always more, always beyond any possible description.

This inability to describe is not a failure but an incredible success. For it means we do not have total dominion over the world around us. There is always something we cannot delimit or direct. The greatest tool humanity has ever created — language — is entirely insufficient when compared to the greatness of experience itself. There is always more, always more, always more.