The Art of Being

by Erich Fromm

Assuming I wake up in the morning and see a blue sky and a shining sun, I am fully aware of the scenery, it makes me happy and more alive, but the experience is an awareness of the sky, of my response to it, and no words come to mind such as: “This is a beautiful sunny day.” Once those words form, and I begin to think about the scenery in these words, the experience has somewhat lost in intensity. When, instead, a melody comes to my mind that expresses joy, or a painting that expresses the same mood, nothing of the experience is lost. The boundary between awareness of feeling and expression of feeling in words is very fluid. There is the completely non-verbalized experience, and close to it the experience in which a word appears like a vessel that “contains” the feeling and yet does not contain it, for the feeling is constantly flowing and it overflows the vessel. The word-vessel is more like a note in a musical score, which is a symbol for a tone but not the tone itself. The feeling may be still more closely related to the word, but as long as the word is still a “living word,” it has done little harm to the feeling. But there comes a point where the word becomes separated from the feeling, i.e., also from the speaking person, and at this point the word has lost its reality, except as a combination of sounds. Many people experience this change. They were aware of a strong, beautiful—or frightening—experience. A day later, when they want to remember it by putting it into w...