Trusting language took me years. Then, just when I was starting to get a good enough grasp on it to feel confident about the meanings it was conveying, I moved to the UK.
I had to start again the painful journey through the opacity of words and sentences to access what people meant.
Ten years later, I have found that it was possible to trust language -to an extend. One should never lose sight of the moving, uncertain, ill-defined nature of its relationship to its referent - the outside world. Words meanings change, with time, with context, depending on who is using these words, or how many times they have been used, depending also on who hears them and how he receives them.
Recognising the fluctuating nature of language is a skill, not a gift. It needs to be acquired. It is however so fundamental that it is almost never taught. This is a great wrong. Only by getting familiar with this nature can one gain confidence when listening, or reading. Understanding one another is a much harder task than what people think. It can only be achieved if we stop reacting to what the other person says, and start listening, very, very carefully.
I had to start again the painful journey through the opacity of words and sentences to access what people meant.
Ten years later, I have found that it was possible to trust language -to an extend. One should never lose sight of the moving, uncertain, ill-defined nature of its relationship to its referent - the outside world. Words meanings change, with time, with context, depending on who is using these words, or how many times they have been used, depending also on who hears them and how he receives them.
Recognising the fluctuating nature of language is a skill, not a gift. It needs to be acquired. It is however so fundamental that it is almost never taught. This is a great wrong. Only by getting familiar with this nature can one gain confidence when listening, or reading. Understanding one another is a much harder task than what people think. It can only be achieved if we stop reacting to what the other person says, and start listening, very, very carefully.
"[...] for the theatre is a great emphasizer - especially to young people, who have no great experience in life by which they might judge the experiences they encounter in literature; and who have no great confidence in language, neither in using it nor in hearing it. The theatre, Dan quite rightly claims, dramatizes both the experience and the confidence in language that young people - such as our students - lack. Students of the age of Dan's, and mine, have no great feeling - for example - for wit, wit simply passes them by, or else they take it to be an elderly form of snobbery; a mere showing off with the language that they use (at best) tentatively. Wit isn't tentative; therefore, neither is it young. Wit is one of many aspects of life and literature that is far easier to recognize on-stage than in a book. My students are always missing the wit in what they read, or else they do not trust it; on-stage, even an amateur actor can make anyone see what wit is."
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Black Swan edition, London, 1990, p:539
