Idea Library
We two- legged have long been creatures of language, of course, but verbal language lived f irst in the shaped breath of utterance, it laughed and stuttered on the tongue long before it lay down on the page, and longer still before it arrayed itself in rows across the glowing screen.”5 Language used to be more like music, perhaps, spoken and heard
... See moreWittgenstein said that “you cannot enter worlds for which you do not have the language.” Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, discusses how learning the language of birders helped her distinguish better between different birds. One of the most pleasurable parts of learning a new domain for me is developing the language that accompanies the... See more
But does illegibility, incomprehension not create in us the desire to enter the world? Why must otherness scare us?
The experience of listening to a language you don't comprehend.
The desire to put distance between yourself and the comprehensible world, to voluntarily suspend understanding and therefore escape the limits of language into an array of new sounds, to not be understood but felt.
On music in a foreign language