when it's silent inside, it feels right

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness', 'joy', or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by again family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."

-- Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

I guess this goes along the same lines as my last post, but I just remembered reading this quote from Middlesex and I started thinking about it.

At first, I feel this strange sense of satisfaction, because I know exactly what Cal means by this.  Sometimes words really are not enough to describe things like the sadness inspired by failing restaurants, and to think that he is putting into words what I have felt so many times in my life is immensely satisfying.  It is something I have always felt but never been able, or even tried to, explain.

And then I realize, what if it is language that is preventing me from doing this? It is a sense that I have never been able to convey -- is it because the english language does not posess the words? But obviously it does. I cannot dismiss my own incapabilities as being the result of the tools I have failed to utilize.  I guess I just think it's interesting that I can both be immensely satisfied with what the passage conveys, but also disappointed in myself for being almost relieved that this oversimplification of English is what has caused me to not think of it for so long.

On that note, I also can't comprehend not comprehending.  Like, French and English have similarities, right? Similar cadence, similar grammar, similar sentence structure.  Learning French in high school has been an interesting experience, but not an impossible one.  It gets easier as you go along, learn to reconcile the two languages not exactly side-by-side, but overlapping with each other.  But then I think about my friends who are taking Chinese, and I feel like an idiot.  I can't even comprehend something so incomprehensible.  There is nothing similar about Chinese and English, and I feel dumb and close-minded for not being able to wrap my brain around the fact that someone can think in Chinese in the same way that I think in English.  I can't even imagine being able to know and understand the symbols or sounds of the language.

It's weird to think of the things I can't imagine, that I don't have the physical capability to conjure up in my brain.  Because these things are beyond my simple imagination, when I try to think of them, there is just empty space.  But I know there is something there.  Will I ever learn how to see it? And how will I know if I've learned if I can't imagine not being able to imagine these things?





It's funny -- instead of asking a question in the beginning and answering it throughout my post, like I usually do, I just did the opposite with this.  I'm not sure if this means anything; it's just something I noticed.