Week 123 of our regular morning feature here at Friedman of the Plains Worldwide in which we highlight the great words and works of great men and women, as well as those who are insufferable, delusional, and even fictional.
This Week Aleksander Hemon
“One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language—the comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn’t want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn’t want to know what we did; we didn’t want to know it either.” — The Book of My Lives
Bonus Hemon
“It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home. ” — The Lazarus Project
As to the second point, a girlfriend once told me, "I love you so much when you're not around."
Re the first, occurrences that require us to actually process before speaking are probably rarer than we'd like to acknowledge, and so we've stored emotional equivalents of "etc." in order not to deal with them but to breeze through them like the child in the rye on the way to the cliff, safe in our faith that someone will be there to catch us.