#147 The Finger Blocks the Moon It Points To

Every word you speak is borrowed from someone else. As a child, you learned the word "love," yet you had never loved anyone; you learned "fear," yet you had not seen true terror. Words arrive long before experience, like a vanguard occupying your mouth before you were even born. So when that unprecedented experience finally comes, you find you can only express it through these borrowed words. The moment you speak it aloud, it ceases to be what you just lived through. It devolves into "love"—a public, smooth-edged "love" that countless others have used a million times over. The deepest experiences take place after language arrives, yet die before language can hold them.