Monologue on Love and Language from "Waking Life"

Here is just one of the many priceless and profound pieces of philosophy from Waking Life, directed by Richard Linklater (director of my two favorites Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, both starred in by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy).

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"When I say love, the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, through their memories of love or lack of love and they register what I'm saying and they say, "Yes, I understand." But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They're just symbols. They're dead. You know."

And so much of our experience is intangible, so much of what we perceive cannot be expressed, it's unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another and we feel that we're connected and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion and that feeling might be transient but I think that's what we live for."

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There are just some things which are either too special, too one-of-a-kind, and too fleeting to share to just anybody because you know you'd never get any second tries at them. But then we explode, we burst those things out - either through conversation, in writing, or any which way that we communicate today. And although we know our conversation, our writing, our explosion, come short of the actual meaning of that moment or that experience or that thought or that feeling that we wish to share, we still do anyway. Because it feels good, because it lifts us up from a down place, it makes us feel we have contributed something to the world's collective memory.