Reading and Language
Cognition is how we make sense of the world. As you may have noticed, we don’t all see the world the same way. As a child, were you as equally obsessed as I was with knowing if we all saw the same green? How can we know?
T. L. Uglow • A Curiosity of Doubts: Penguin Special
Yes! And it felt like there was no way to explain what I was asking. Do you see the same red as I see? By definition, red is red, but that wasn’t what I was asking. I was asking if our souls swapped places and escaped the contextless silos of our individual experiences, what I would see through your eyes?
Just as most of what happens to us dissolves, becomes part of an inner compost known in generalized terms—“my high school years,” “boot camp,” and so on—so most of what we have read loses definition and becomes a blurry wash.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Even if you don’t understand words. Understand that they sometimes just need somewhere to go.
But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.
Terry Pratchett • Equal Rites: (Discworld Novel 3) (Discworld series)
intense effort to express and connect is inherently limited by the boundaries of language itself, highlighting its insufficiency.
Another point I might elaborate on a little is about words. We tend to forget that words are, themselves, ideas. They might be called ideas in a state of suspended animation. When the words are mastered the ideas tend to come alive again.
James Webb Young • A Technique for Producing Ideas
Words are an attempt to condense the electricity of one mind into the shared/stagnant/dead medium of language, so that another mind can hold it and reenact the electricity that created it.
We often think of language as a means to an end, but rarely take the time to consider whether language in itself is influencing our thoughts, not just enabling the sharing of them.