English language’s crisis of inarticulacy. His mother tongue, he suspected, was incapable of expressing the complexities that lay dormant in a single word. It could not, for instance, describe snow the way the Eskimos did with their dozen synonyms. It did not see the diversity that fell with each flake. Nor had the English language experienced rains in the way the people in the straits of Malacca had. Their word for heaven meant sublime rain, and hell was rain that drowned. All life was an oscillation between the two. No word—certainly not the innocuous ‘love’—could be used to describe the
...more
