My appreciation for language and literature keeps increasing steadily, while I remain constantly aware of the insufficiency of words. Feelings and experiences are like continuous fields that fade out into the horizon (tending to zero but never getting there), while words are discrete and very crude approximations of those feelings and experiences.
Yet, the particular arrangement of words, the finesse of the reader, and the particular configuration of time when she reads – all these together has a capability of taking the reader into a deep intimate garden of those feelings and its continuous field. Intimate with the person who wrote those words, intimate with the reader herself, intimate with our world in general, into a suspended realm of pure wordless experience that is totally independent of time.
As the appreciation for language and literature grows, even writing a business email starts feeling beautiful to me.
Each and every word is a shining gateway into infinity, worthy of loving focused attention. Attention not with furrowed brow, but attention as a mother may gently hold a baby in her arms, relaxed, with ease, knowing the baby is holy. Attention as one may listen to all that tree trunks tell us.
On the other hand what is your opinion of people who can craft ‘a web of words’ conjuring a false or illusory world which nevertheless seems plausible or even real?
All arrangement of words *are* a web of words. False or not, I feel depends heavily on the state of mind of the reader and how the reader receives the words – else even Shankaracharya’s words can seem empty words that make no sense and sound hogwash and the most crass so-called false words can point to light. It is dependent on what the reader is seeking. We see what we want to see. Reading takes us to our own self first. The person who wrote can be wanting to say X, the person who reads might hear Y – and both are equally valid and correct.
What is false or illusory, what is real, depends on what we want to believe.