Capture the Experience

I come from a place where there is no snow, no seasons changing, and no temperature difference beyond ten degrees the whole year. One may start imagining such place and relate it to Hawaii, but I can continue describe that my place is no way near the beauty of the island. One will sweat walking on the street and not even stand of the heat and humid of the place. Someone who has never been to those places will have trouble figuring how it feels to stay there. Just as same as me when people tell me the beauty of white snow and a huge surface covered by white snow that I have never seen before I came here. I can only refer to images I saw in movies, but I can hardly feel the snowflakes dropping on my skin and the feeling stepping into snows because it needs to be experienced by myself.

So the question is can language capture the enormity of an experience? Most of the part is my answer. You not only need the sense of feeling to participate in an experience, but also the cognitive ability to make sense of the experience. With that, each person has his or her own understanding of an experience described in words. Looking at words on a piece of paper or listening to sentences spoken through the space, the audiences may have difficulties in totally understand and feel the experience the same way as the writers and speakers. Language can never recreate experience by it own, no matter how precise and accurate the words chosen to illustrate the event. However, we cant ignore the usefulness and significant of language to commute experience.

Language acts as a median to deliver experience to others. Without language, we cant even keep those experience we had as record our selves. Words help people remember and summarize the experience. It can encourage other people to experience other things themselves. People relate the experience they listen or read to the experience they have. Language is by far the only way to learn about other experience as humans communicate using all kinds of languages. I know three kinds of languages, but I am sure I wont be able to tell my own experience thoroughly with any of the languages.

People try to close the gap between experience learned and imagined by going through the experience themselves. But with a little bit of imagination and own experience of the audiences, they themselves can recreate their own unique experience. And, language simplifies the process of recreating an experience.