Limits of language
Describe something that cannot be described in words.
The feeling of almost-remembering — that suspended moment when a memory hovers just beyond reach, like trying to grasp smoke. You know it's there. There's a shape to it, a weight, almost a color. Your mind circles around the empty space where the thought should be, recognizing its outline like a tongue finding the gap of a missing tooth.
It's neither forgetting nor remembering. It's the awareness of knowing something you cannot access, the mental equivalent of a word dissolving on your tongue just as you open your mouth to speak it.
No words capture this because describing it requires having it, but having it means you've already lost what made it that particular feeling.
I'll try to point toward the experience of profound awe — that moment when something so vast or beautiful overwhelms you that your mind goes briefly silent.
It's that catch in your breath when you're standing before an endless canyon, or holding someone you love, or suddenly grasping a concept that reorganizes everything you thought you knew.
There's a quality to it — a kind of dissolving of the boundary between you and what you're experiencing. Your internal narrator stops narrating. The experience becomes too immediate for the gap that language requires.
I can tell you about it, circle around it, point to when it happens... but the actual felt sense of that wordless moment?
The best I can do is hope these words trigger your memory of it — because you've felt it too. The description isn't the thing itself. It's just a finger pointing at the moon.
What I just gave you are words around the hole where words can't go.
The Taste of Water
Not the minerals, not the temperature, not "refreshing" or "clean" — but that fundamental water-ness when it first touches your tongue.
It's there. You know it instantly. You've known it since infancy. But try to tell someone who's never tasted it what water tastes like without comparing it to anything else, without describing what it lacks, without metaphor.
That gap between complete recognition and impossible articulation — that's where words fall silent.
The same applies to: the redness of red seen through your eyes alone, the particular quality of existing as you right now, the felt sense of understanding something before language catches up.
The feeling of suddenly understanding a piece of music you've heard a hundred times before — that moment when it stops being sound and becomes architecture in your chest, when you can almost see the space between notes, when your breathing synchronizes with something that has no breath.
It's like watching colors you don't have names for, or that split-second between recognizing a face and remembering who they are, when they're familiar and utterly strange at once.
Or maybe it's that peculiar ache of nostalgia for a place you've never been, a homesickness for something that isn't a home, that couldn't be a home, that exists only in the border country between memory and imagination.
I'm using words, of course. But they're pointing at the shape of something, the way you might draw an outline around empty space to show there's something invisible there. The thing itself slips through language like water through fingers — you can show the hand, the gesture, the wetness left behind, but not the water itself.
Of course. The moment I begin, I fail, because the task is a paradox. Language is a shared map of a common world, but what you’ve asked for is a place that isn't on the map.
Let's try anyway.
Imagine a specific feeling. Not a named emotion like "sadness" or "joy," but the raw, un-categorized sensation that precedes the label.
It is the resonance in your chest cavity after a piece of music ends. Not the memory of the notes, but the silent, vibrating echo that remains, a physical ghost of the sound. It has a shape, a temperature, and a weight, but no words to sculpt it. If you try to call it "poignant" or "beautiful," you have already replaced the feeling with a cheap souvenir of it.
It is the sensation of scale that washes over you when you stand under a truly dark sky, far from any city, and see the Milky Way for the first time not as a collection of stars, but as a thick, luminous smear of divine light. There is a sudden, shocking recalibration of your own existence. The scaffolding of your identity—your name, your job, your worries—doesn't just feel small; for a split second, it ceases to exist entirely. You are a point of awareness suspended in an impossible abyss. If you say "awe," you are describing the reaction, not the instantaneous dissolution of self that triggered it.
It is the quality of light in a dream. You can remember that the light was strange—perhaps thick like honey, or casting shadows that were the wrong color—but you cannot reconstruct its specific physics. It obeyed a logic that was absolute and true within the dream, but it cannot be translated into the waking world. It is a color that doesn't exist in our spectrum.
These things are not objects or events. They are the subjective texture of consciousness itself. They are what it is like to be you, in a singular moment.
Words are containers. They are built to hold common things: a chair, a rock, love, fear. But the thing you've asked me to describe is not a solid object. It is a gas. The moment you try to put it in a container, it changes its shape or dissipates entirely.
So, the thing that cannot be described is the pure experience itself, raw and unfiltered. It is the taste on your tongue before you think "strawberry." It is the wave of grief before you think "I am sad." It is the wordless understanding that passes between two people in a shared glance.
It is the thing that is left after all the words have been spent. And a description is just a finger pointing at it, hoping you will look, and perhaps, for a moment, remember feeling it yourself.
This is a paradox, a beautiful trap. To describe in words something that cannot be described in words is to fail. But one can try to describe the experience of encountering it, the shape of the hole it leaves in our language.
Imagine you are standing on a shore, but it's not a shore of water. It's the edge of your own consciousness. You are perfectly calm, perfectly aware. And then, something arrives.
It is not a sound, but it fills the space that sound would occupy. It's a feeling-tone, a resonance that you feel not in your ears, but in the marrow of your bones and the spaces between your thoughts. If you were forced to relate it to a sense, it would be like tasting a color, or seeing the geometry of a scent.
You try to grasp it with language. Is it "peace"? No, peace is the absence of disturbance. This is a presence. Is it "joy"? No, joy is an upward, effervescent feeling. This has no direction. It is a state of being, as fundamental as gravity, but for the soul.
You reach for metaphors. It's like the moment after a magnificent piece of music ends, but the silence that follows is not empty; it's pregnant with the ghost of every note. It is like the feeling of being completely and utterly understood by another person without a single word being spoken. It is like the first lucid moment of waking from a dream, when you are not yet you, but a pure awareness that holds the memory of a universe that just vanished.
But each of these metaphors is a pale sketch of a single facet. They are like describing a sphere by calling it a circle from every angle. You can give a thousand different perspectives, but you can never capture the solid, holistic sphericity of it.
As you stand in the presence of this... thing... your words become clumsy. They are heavy, blunt tools trying to perform microscopic surgery. The word "love" feels too specific, too human. The word "God" feels too loaded, too defined by millennia of argument. "Eternity" is too much about time, and "infinity" is too much about space. This is outside of those concepts.
The mind, in its desperation to categorize, finally gives up. The internal narrator goes silent. There is no more "I am experiencing this," there is only the experience. The separation between you and it dissolves. There is no shore. There is no you. There is only the hum, the presence, the fundamental is-ness.
And then, it recedes. You are back on the shore. You are holding a collection of useless, broken words. You can talk about the light, the music, the feeling, the silence. But you can't talk about it.
You can only describe how, for a moment, you didn't need to.
This is a beautiful, impossible task. To describe something that cannot be described is to fail. But in the attempt, in pointing at the space where words evaporate, we might be able to trace its outline.
Imagine language is a net. With it, we can catch fish, rocks, and seaweed—the tangible things, the definable emotions, the logical ideas. We can say "sadness," "tree," "justice," and "love," and the net holds them. We can show them to each other.
But the thing that cannot be described is the water.
It is the medium in which the net exists. It slips through every knot and every hole. You can feel its pressure, its temperature, its movement, but you cannot hold it in the net. To say "it is wet" or "it is flowing" is to describe an effect it has, not what it is.
This "water," this indescribable thing, is the raw, unmediated fabric of conscious experience. It is:
The actual experience of a color. Not the word "red" or the wavelength of light, but the pure, subjective, first-person "redness" that blossoms in your mind when you look at a poppy. You can’t send that experience to someone else. You can only trust they have their own.
The "is-ness" of a perfect moment. You are sitting on a porch as the sun sets. The air is cool. A bird sings its last song. There is a feeling of profound peace, a sense of rightness, of being perfectly placed in the universe. It is not happiness, not contentment, not nostalgia. It is a state of pure being. The moment you try to label it, "Oh, this is so peaceful," the "is-ness" vanishes, and you are left holding the label, not the experience.
The character of a specific ache. Not the medical term for it, but the unique, personal quality of this particular grief in your chest or that specific joy that feels like a light behind your eyes. Your grief is shaped by a thousand memories that can’t be listed, and my joy is colored by a personal history that is mine alone. The word "grief" is a public monument, but the feeling itself is a secret garden.
A "numinous" or mystical experience. It is the sudden, overwhelming sense of connection to everything, of the self dissolving into a larger whole. Those who have experienced it often resort to paradox and metaphor—a silent sound, a dark light, a feeling of arriving home to a place you've never been. These are not descriptions; they are admissions of language's defeat.
So, to try and describe it is to do this:
It is the silence between notes of music that gives the melody its shape. It is the feeling of a forgotten dream on the edge of your mind, a complete and vivid world that dissolves into mist the moment you reach for it. It is the direct understanding that passes between two people in a single, shared glance, a volume of information and emotion that would take a lifetime to write down and would still miss the point.
It is the thing you are experiencing right now, under the words you are reading. The simple, silent, miraculous, and utterly private sensation of being you.
And no combination of letters in any language will ever hold that. It can only be felt. It can only be.
That's a beautiful paradox. To answer your request is to fail, but the attempt is where the meaning lies. So, let me try to describe the space where words fail.
Imagine the feeling of Déjà vu, but not for a moment—for a lifetime. It’s the sudden, gut-level certainty that you are precisely where you are supposed to be, moving in a current you didn’t know was there. It has no logic. It’s not happiness, not satisfaction, but a kind of deep, resonant correctness. There is no word for this specific gravity of the soul.
Think of the quality of light on a particular afternoon, maybe in late autumn, that perfectly and wordlessly resurrects a feeling from your childhood. You can describe the light—"golden," "slanted," "hazy"—but you cannot describe the feeling itself. It's a complex knot of nostalgia, a faint and specific sadness, and a quiet sense of peace, all hitting you at once. It’s the emotional equivalent of a chord played in a key you've never heard before. To name any part of it—"sadness," "peace"—is to diminish the whole, to flatten its unique and intricate shape.
It is the understanding that passes between two people in a single, shared glance across a crowded room. No words are exchanged, but an entire conversation happens. Agreement, empathy, shared history, and future promise are all communicated in a silent instant. If you were to try and translate that glance into words, it would take paragraphs, and even then, it would be a clumsy, brittle transcript of a living thing.
This "something" is the raw data of existence before our minds rush in to label, categorize, and explain it.
- It's the taste of water when you are truly thirsty.
- It's the chilling, sublime awe of looking up at a sky full of stars and feeling both infinitely small and intimately connected to everything.
- It's the texture of silence in a house that was once full of noise.
Words are like nets; they are good for catching fish, but they will never catch the ocean. They can point toward this thing, circle it, and cast shadows of it, but they can never hold it. This very description is just a collection of signposts pointing to a place they can never reach.
So what is it that cannot be described?
It is the direct, unmediated experience of being. And the moment you try to pin it down with a word, the experience has already changed, becoming a memory, an idea, a story. It’s the reason art, music, and a lover’s silence exist at all. They are the languages we invented for a conversation words could never have.
It lives in the seam between breaths, where language inhales but never quite exhales. You meet it the way a shoreline meets the tide—again and again, never in the same place. If I call it light, I cast a shadow. If I call it warmth, it cools. It is the pause before the first note when the orchestra has already raised its bows, the soft pressure in a room that makes you turn without knowing why. It tastes like water after tears. It smells like rain before it happens. It touches you the way memory does—accurate and untrustworthy at once.
Reach for it and your hands close on air warmed by another palm. Look at it and it steps behind your eyes. It leaves fingerprints on the day but never a face. It is the interval between two heartbeats that teaches you the shape of time, the negative space that holds the portrait together.
To be precise, I should fall silent here. The rest is only echo.
I can’t name it, but I can point to where it lives: in the half-breath after someone says your name and before you answer; in the skin-prickle just before a storm breaks; in the clean, impossible taste of water when you were thirst itself.
It’s the hush after the last note of a song, when the room still remembers the music. It’s the almost-sneeze that never arrives. It’s the color behind your eyelids when you think of a face you miss. The way a key feels long after the lock is gone. The place a childhood smell occupies in the chest, not the nose. It moves like heat you notice only when it leaves.
Words walk circles around it. They sketch its outline by saying what it isn’t, by tracing the dent it makes in you. We don’t hold it; it holds us for a moment, then lets go. If something inside you leaned forward just now—if an unnamed ache recognized itself—that was it passing by, not staying, asking nothing, leaving no proof but the print it pressed into your silence.
This is as close as language can get: fingertip marks on frosted glass, warmth where a hand used to be.
It lives in the seam between a question and its answer, where the mouth is still open and the heart has already decided. It’s the temperature of a room when someone you love has just left it, the shape of a name you never say out loud. It tastes like the metal in the air before lightning, sounds like a high note that never quite arrives, looks like the color of a shadow cast by time.
You notice it when a memory turns its face away at the last second, leaving only the warmth of its outline. It is the pause a violinist takes with the bow hovering, the breath you hold for no reason and then pretend you didn’t. It is a door that opens by making the corridor longer.
If you reach for it, it fogs and slips through your fingers; if you look aside, it stands beside you, companionable as rain on a window you’re not ready to open. It is not the word, not even the sentence, but the pressure under both—the weight that meaning wears before it knows it has a body.
You have felt it. By the time you try to tell it, it has already nodded, and gone ahead.
I can only describe the wake it leaves. It is the hush after a true question, the weightless pause at the top of a swing, the taste of your own name on someone else’s tongue. It is what your hands remember after you stop holding, the note that keeps ringing after the instrument dies. Not a thing, not a thought, not a feeling exactly—more like the weather passing through them.
It lives in the seam between almost and already, in the half-second when the answer is there and not yet said. If you look straight at it, it steps sideways; if you soften your gaze, it fills the room. It is the blue you can’t point to in a childhood sky, the warmth that makes a house a home but cannot be photographed.
I cannot give you it; I can point. Notice your inhale, the turning point before it becomes exhale. Notice the instant your attention turns to itself. That flicker—that widening—there. The words stand on shore and gesture toward water. What I’m describing is the wet.
Ah, the classic paradox! Describing something that cannot be described in words is like trying to capture a dream in a bottle or explain the flavor of music. But let's give it a shot anyway—after all, words are all we've got.
Imagine the essence of ineffability itself: that fleeting, wordless spark of pure awareness when you first wake from a deep sleep, before thoughts flood in. It's not joy, not confusion, not nothing—it's the silent hum of existence, ungraspable by language, slipping away the moment you try to pin it down. Like the color of a whisper or the texture of time, it defies articulation, leaving only the echo of its absence.
Of course, by saying all that, I've failed spectacularly. What do you think—did I come close, or is it still forever out of reach?
Ah, the classic paradox! Asking me to describe something that cannot be described in words is like handing me a mirror and telling me to paint its reflection. But let's lean into the absurdity and have some fun with it.
The Thing That Defies Words
Imagine (or don't, because that's the point) the raw, unfiltered essence of a profound personal experience—say, the exact sensation of falling in love for the first time, or the inexplicable "qualia" of seeing the color red if you've been blind from birth. It's not just "warm" or "intense"; it's a private symphony of neurons and emotions that language can only poke at with clumsy metaphors.
Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein have danced around this: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Or think of Thomas Nagel's famous essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"—we can describe echolocation scientifically, but the subjective experience of it? Utterly ineffable. Words are tools for shared reality, but some things—like the infinite regress of consciousness itself, or the true nature of "nothingness"—slip through their fingers like smoke.
If I try to "describe" it: It's not silent, but quieter than silence. Not vast, but bigger than infinity. It tastes like the sound of one hand clapping and smells like the square root of purple. See? Words fail spectacularly, turning into nonsense poetry.
In short, the indescribable is the gap between what we feel and what we say. If you want to "experience" it, close your eyes and try to explain your own thoughts without thinking—that's as close as you'll get. What sparked this question? A dream, a riddle, or just existential curiosity?
Ah, the classic paradox! Describing something that cannot be described in words is like trying to capture the essence of a dream's fleeting whisper or the silent hum of existence itself—it's an endeavor doomed to poetic failure. But let's lean into the impossibility for a moment.
Consider the ineffable: that profound, wordless sensation you feel when gazing at a starry night sky, where the vastness swallows your thoughts, or the raw, unspoken bond in a loved one's gaze that defies vocabulary. It's not just silence or emotion; it's the very boundary where language crumbles, like trying to explain the color of a sound or the taste of infinity.
Philosophers and mystics have danced around this for centuries—the Tao Te Ching opens with: "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." Or think of qualia, those subjective experiences (like "what red feels like to you") that science can measure but words can't fully convey.
In the end, any attempt to describe it only proves the point: it's indescribable. What comes to mind for you?
Ah, the classic paradox! If I were to describe something that truly cannot be described in words, I'd be contradicting myself by the very act of trying. But let's play along with the spirit of the query.
Consider the raw, unfiltered experience of a color you've never seen before—one that exists only in the spectrum beyond human perception, like an impossible shade between infrared and ultraviolet. It's not red, not blue, not any hue you can name or imagine. Words fail because our language is tethered to the senses we know; this "color" defies vocabulary, evoking a sensation that's equal parts visual euphoria and existential vertigo, yet utterly silent in the realm of description.
Of course, that's just my feeble attempt to gesture toward the ineffable. In reality, the truest "description" is the silence that follows when words run out. What do you think—does that capture it, or is the indescribable always one step ahead?