I have not been able to come up with one, definitive answer for this question. At first, as I reflected on all the books, articles and poems I have read, I thought the answer was surely a yes. I felt this, and part of me still sees it this way, because there have been many authors –and speakers – who have crafted their language and tone in such a way that I have been driven to shed tears, turn on the lights, laugh out loud, or sigh wistfully while reading or listening to them. The author’s best shot at connecting with his audience is to choose his words with care and thoughtfulness. The right words have the power to move the audience, to make them feel like they themselves are immersed in the story, in the characters, and ultimately, in the experiences of what they are reading/hearing. I always know it’s a great book when I finish it feeling like I know the characters -- as if I could be friends with them in my real life – because I’ve “felt” their pain, laughed at their jokes, “watched” them grow. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that relating to people and emphasizing with their stories, no matter how much emotion it inspires in you, cannot hold a candle to the actual experience.
Although my eyes may well up with tears every time I read a news article about the death of a soldier and the horrors of war, I will never understand what those soldiers and those communities have gone, and are going, through. I can gasp in horror and say “how awful” when I see pictures of the victims of war, but I’ll never feel their terror, I’ll never know how petrifying it is to walk through or live in war-torn towns, wondering if myself and my loved ones will live through the day. There are simply no words that can capture the reality of such a situation. Similarly, every time I turn on the news there are countless stories of murder, rape, destruction and all sorts of unimaginable events that have occurred since the previous day. No matter how profoundly language is used, words just cannot capture the suffering and emptiness a parent feels when they have lost a child, whether to accident or a horrific tragedy. Language can be beautiful and it can speak to the soul, but we can pick ourselves up from words, we can move on from them, leave them behind. We cannot do that with our memories. Words may inspire us to feel sympathy and compassion for those parents and soldiers, but at the end of the day, they are just words. It is not our experience and therefore, not our memories or our pain.
This, of course, is not strictly limited to experiences of immense sadness. Someone else’s happiness can never be our own. If you are anything at all like me, you read travel magazines, look at pictures of beautiful, faraway places and/or enjoy shows like Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on the Travel Channel. Reading about, listening to, and even watching someone else’s travel experiences will never be the same as being there and doing those things yourself. It doesn’t matter how many times someone tells me how majestic the pyramids are, how searing the Sahari may be, or how serene the Indian Ocean looks from the beaches of Phuket. These stories only make me long for my own experiences at these places, they are not able to capture it well enough to make me feel as if I no longer want or need to travel there. That’s why I believe that despite languages power to speak to the soul, and sway emotions, words will never be able to capture moments the way first-hand experience will.
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