Hello, I’m Julie, a would-be person in charge of the fictitious Department of Culture and Art of TPJ. In this blog post I would like to write freely about my favorite things, mainly about books, art, music, etc. Please read it at your leisure. Today I will write some thoughts about words.
I recall the impressive words of Kazuo Ishiguro in an interview on NHK several years ago. “Memory is a partial victory over death.” I guess it means that the dead live on in other people’s memories. If so, obviously the same logic applies equally to words.
How vast an amount of words does a man hold and keep unspoken before he dies? Surely the unspoken words must outnumber the spoken words by an overwhelming number. The unspoken words and thoughts of the deceased vanish with their death. There would be words which they wanted to speak but couldn’t, as well as words they didn’t want or dare to say for the good of the company. The truth of a person, either intentionally or unintentionally, could lie in those unspoken words rather than in the spoken.
If you would like to understand the feelings of the living person in front of you and listen to the myriad of unspoken words which exist behind the spoken, there are many clues to recognize in, for example, their appearance, behavior, expression, or eyes.
When you think of the dead, and if something they wrote remains, you can read a part of what they thought or felt. But these written words were consciously expressed, from inside to the outside world. But if things the person habitually used remain, alternatively those things can tell something about that person. Sometimes things freed from a person’s will can tell more about that person than their own words.
Undoubtedly it is impossible for us to express everything. And yet once our thoughts and feelings are given shape in the form of words, they can be conveyed from person to person, where words play the role of a vehicle. It is not until words in whatever shape, generated and created and woven, are brought out that they are ready to be received by someone, and it is not until they are received that they are shared with the person who received them, then are taken in and expressed in a different shape by that person. And if this relay continues, words and thoughts will surely be able to live forever.