In a world with millions of pages of dictionaries, the moments that make you speechless are worth treasuring. You truly feel ‘lost for words’. It may be that you’ve briefly forgotten which words to use (words which definitely do exist) but I think that there are also times when no word exists to describe X. When we use them as labels, words help us make sense of things, so it can be destabilising when you can’t find the word for a certain sensation, or thought. It’s not as if the word is at the tip of your tongue, it’s nowhere to be seen.
And I’m not sure there are any words for the insanity that all life descends from a common ancestor, for the shocking beauty of the night sky, for the poetic face of science, for peace, for how complicated everything is. So I sit to observe with awe, in silence.