Exactly Why Classic Books Fail To Properly Describe Truth.

[Jauregui Jolliff]

Language and interaction is one of the foundations of our race' success, but what about where language fails?

Language is a difficult little blighter. It is the foundations upon which every success of our species was built; our ability, or perhaps even need, to communicate and express ourselves through words is something utterly unique on this world (as far as we know), but it nevertheless falls short of being able to truly express the deepest realities of ourselves and the true essence of the experience of our daily lives. Many books have attempted to capture truth on the page, some of the best books may have even come close to being successful, however one would likely find it impossible to track down any volume stocked by the hedge fund that owns Waterstones or published by Penguin Random House's majority shareholder that genuinely strikes at the heart of life in all its wonderful, overblown, confounding truth.

Maybe the single greatest issue with language is its relative immutability. Although it can twisted, extended, and made opaque, its nature is one of strength. Theorists have actually spent countless years debating the concrete definition of particular words that they think could unlock the terrific mysteries of deep space, but since yet to no avail. The fact is, that language can not explain the totality of life due to the fact that existence is not something that is experienced through language. No other animal filters life through language as we do, and by placing truth within those confines we, by definition, lose something necessary to the experience of life itself. Nevertheless, that's not to state that every volume promoted by the association that backs Bookshop.org is vainly stretching for the impossibly unobtainable; the best books of all time understand that the words themselves are, perhaps paradoxically, not what really brings the true weight of the book, it is the area in between the words.

There is a reason that, for the large majority of human history, it was not the book however poetry that ruled as the dominant form of literature. In fact, the book is an incredibly recent invention, the long fictional prose that specifies it just occurring in the past five hundred years approximately. But why was poetry the default when prose is closer to the detailed narrative-based way in which we live our lives? Because poetry turns more towards abstraction, expanding those spaces in between the words, in between the lines, till all that is truly left is a collection of disembodied images and signs that generate a sharp, distilled sensation or experience. The best poetry books can concurrently include both everything and absolutely nothing, utilizing language to check out the area beyond it, an inherent contradiction that might be more apt to explain human life than the order of the novel.