Can language capture the enormity of experience?

This is a question that provokes further questions that will be explored in this post. If the ‘experience’ is that of the author who is trying to share the entirety of their experience with a reader, then language is not powerful enough to capture and share the entirety of it – just like how the human brain is not equipped to handle the entirety of sensory ‘experience’ that the universe consistently churns out. I ate a big bowl of Cheerios with banana slices and skim milk this morning. If I wanted to share that experience from the first crisp bite of Cheerios to their soggy finale, then I would fail in trying to pass this experience on to my reader. They might get hungry, but they wouldn’t come close to being able to recreate it without getting their own bowl of Cheerios, a banana, and some skim milk and creating a similar experience for themselves. Good authors are probably the ones that can get very close to recreating these sensory experiences in the mind of their readers, but language is still not powerful enough to evoke all of the senses or all of the potential in our brains.

But in this regard the question is a bit silly and obvious, so I will move on to what I feel is a more interesting or reframed approach to this question.

Which experience is more valuable? Is it the original author's intended attempt to share his or her experience, or is it the experience that the reader creates for themselves? With language something is always obfuscated or hidden and not what the author truly implied. The reader picks up that story and changes it for themselves based on their own experiences. Language, then, becomes the cut and paste enabler of new, created experience that is malleable, testable, and even more powerful when put together and interpreted in the human brain. The reader allows his or her own experiences to affect the experience they have with the author’s text. In a way, this “disadvantage” or shortcoming of language allows for the “good stuff,” the malleable creation of the individual mind that warps the real story, the real experiences, and creates. When Dostoevsky died, the true “experience” he meant to convey died with him, but his language continues to live through the new sensory experience invoked by his text in the reader. Thousands of essays interpret different portions of his language trying to find new meaning or interesting interpretations, and in their subjectivity there is no right or wrong experience, just a personal one.

Thus, I would argue, that while language cannot capture the every detail, feeling, and thought that goes into someone else’s experience, this creation of a new experience for the reader using language then becomes the most important experience that transcends the original and can be captured in its entirety and then reshaped into new language for the next person to create their own fully captured experience.