For, when you read, or when you hear words, they are coloured with tone, and voice, and context. The picture, video and sound are there therefore, integral but orchestral, for it is the words that are the show.

The best ideas may even be pre-verbal - more intuitive and knowing than articulate and clever. We know this: when we experience a sudden glimpse of some hitherto elusive Meaning of a virtue in life - such as ‘acceptance’ or ‘love’ or ‘peace’, it indeed is often wordless. The glimpse is flashed, felt, perceived, or somehow understood, and then the body translates that glimpse into… words: ‘this is what it means to love someone’, or ‘this is what peace must feel like’. For these experiences, words are at their best, only impressionistic - they seek to capture the overall sense of the moment, the perfume of it, before it fades and passes. But words can never express them fully. And that’s why we say the best ideas are pre-verbal. If you don’t know this already, you one day will.

Nonetheless, “everyday life” cannot concern itself only with life’s highest virtues and experiences, because for many of us, the systems and societies were live in do not readily support them. Living wordlessly and pre-verbally in the higher realms of - again, for example - acceptance, peace and love, may require us to renounce our work, our families, our 'friends', and our possessions. Could you imagine practising ‘love’ and ‘acceptance’ in a discussion with your spouse, not about the deep question of if to forgive them for cheating, but if to order starters before the main? … Love and acceptance wouldn’t really come into it. It can feel, or indeed be, too impractical to live in the lofty realms.

And so for some ideas - the everyday ones, the useful ones, the ones that help you not fuck up so much, the ones that give you a mini-glimpse the other side, and the ones that kiss the toe of the highest ideas… for all these, you need words, because words are the encoders of the everyday, of the waking hours, and they give poetry and structure to the days of our lives.

So that’s why words.