inarticulable knowledge
Metaphors are slippery, like memory. But then, putting things to words is always a translation, an approximation of the thing. There’s perhaps no better reminder of that than our inability to describe the sensation of scent, its transportability, what it feels like and means to us. As Epstein suggests, the mind and memory are equally inarticulable ... See more
Meg Miller • Metaphorically speaking｜Dirt
What was that thing we had learned in our rhetoric class, about Derrida’s “deferral of meaning” and how words are merely signs that can never fully summon what they mean? Yet words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us farther away.
Hua Hsu • Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
The most powerful human emotions are terribly difficult to explain in a way that doesn’t diminish them, or that doesn’t make you look slightly ridiculous in the telling. How easy to safeguard them then, and keep things close, rather than risk looking foolish or being misheard.
Joe Fassler • Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process
You have an inchoate, inarticulate, groping feeling that there is something else, something more, something that may be scary but may also be beautiful.