Jack London

from Martin Eden (1909)

 “I hope I am learning to talk,” he stammered.  “There seems to be so much in me I want to say.  But it is all so big.  I can’t find ways to say what is really in me.  Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman.  I feel—oh, I can’t describe it—I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child.  It is a great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation.  It is a lordly task.  See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies.  It is a breath of the universe I have breathed.  I know song and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell them to you, to the world.  But how can I?  My tongue is tied.  I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass.  But I have not succeeded.  I have no more than hinted in awkward speech.  My words seem gibberish to me.  And yet I am stifled with desire to tell.  Oh!—” he threw up his hands with a despairing gesture—“it is impossible!  It is not understandable!  It is incommunicable!”