The poverty of language

I’m not sure what to write, I just know that I must. Somebody once said there was a poverty of language. How true that is. The infuriating truth about emotions, feelings, is the impossibility of capturing them within a page. They remain forever outside of our grasp. Sure, poets and scholars with hands and minds far more knowledgeable than myself have tried in vain over the years to meet such a need for so many. It strikes me that the thing that arguably makes us uniquely human, language, the very tool we evolved over millions of years is still so hopeless to describe the facets of our very existence. A scientific mind can describe beautifully the smallest parts of us, the central nervous system, the bones of our ears, the nerves of our eyes, all of it drawn and described in minute detail. All lines and pencils; and yet the most basic of emotions, is spat out in a line of adjectives barely touching the surface of the sea within. Instead we seek to feel, we seek moments in space and time. We search out ways to grasp something that can never be quantified by words. A thirst for something we and our exceptional minds can’t describe. We take risks, we gamble, we cry, we scream, we walk among the trees. We eat, we laugh, we dance. The meaning of life for me is to be able to describe it.

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