EAR EGG NUTS

“Modern literature, she announced, must admit its limits. Nothing can ever really be described. Words, like paint, are not a mirror.”

“Words make reality seem as if it is composed of discrete parts- like adjectives, nouns, and verbs- when in actual experience, all these different parts run together.”

-Lerer, “Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language”

I know we are supposed to choose one quote from a primary reading as well as one from a secondary reading. However, I can’t find one of the secondary readings, and the only other secondary reading deals with Stein’s work. I do not know how to read Stein’s work. I cannot even begin to fathom what it is saying. I really enjoyed the Handy Guide by Dean Young, but I am unsure of how to relate it back to the secondary reading. So I am just going to talk about two of the quotes I picked from the secondary reading. The first discusses the limits of language, as does the second. The first states that nothing can be described and the second kind of explains why. The second quote is more interesting to me. In our everyday lives, when we are talking or thinking, many processes are involved. This means that no matter how thorough our language is, we cannot really describe everything. We have so many different emotions that are involved in thoughts and speech, as well as writing. There are some experiences, that when put down on paper, fall short of the real thing. If you took a sentence like ‘my boyfriend broke up with me’, you have to look at the sentence as a whole. You can’t just look at the nouns and verbs, as stated in the second quote. It is what the sentence is saying when it is all put together that matters. Besides that point, there could be a high level emotion having to do with that sentence that cannot be described with words. The situation in which an activity occurred may also be impossible to describe in words, let alone one sentence. The ‘background’ of that sentence or fact , so to speak, as well as the emotions related to that background, are impossible to put into words so accurately that every reader would feel the same way as other readers or the writer. My old calculus teacher hated words. He would get so riled up when we talked about language at all. He would just yell, ‘I don’t even understand them. Sentences are made up of words, which are just a jumble of letters thrown together, which are just random symbols. And don’t even get me started on how we can even listen to those random symbols and draw ideas and thoughts from them!” I mean, the idea really is mind-blowing. The fact is, those random symbols will never be able to describe true emotions and true thoughts of the writer.