splendid poverties

I remember lying in a ditch and staring at some pebbles while German bombers were flying over our heads. That was long ago, I don’t remember the face of my mother nor the faces of the people who were with us, but I still see those perfectly ordinary pebbles.
[…]
The pebbles stayed in their otherness, stayed forever in memory. Can language do justice to such moments of heightened consciousness? Speech is always less. When it comes to conveying what it means to be truly conscious, one approximates, one fails miserably.

Wittgenstein puts it this way: “What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses ‘itself’ in language, we cannot express by means of language. This has been my experience many times. Words are impoverishments, splendid poverties.

—Charles Simic, “Reading Philosophy at Night,” The Life of Images: Selected Prose (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015)