https://lithub.com/whereof-one-cannot-speak-on-the-limits-of-language-to-describe-pain/
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“Is your pain burning or aching, throbbing or cutting, stabbing or radiating?”
“Ed Simon Elaine Scarry Franz Kafka language Ludwig Wittgenstein pain poetics Sally Rooney Susan Sontag the body Ed Simon Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, a staff writer for Lit Hub, and the editor of Belt Magazine .”
“Fallible animals though we are, unable to ever comprehend that this too shall pass, we interpret both misery and bliss as eternal states.”
“How fortunate then are we to have metaphor, incomplete though it is, to turn pain into words, rather than transmuting our words into pain.”
“Ecstasy, however, is all too often fleeting, while pain prefers to stay for a while.”
“Nonetheless, the charged significance of literature, as opposed to the stick-figures of the Wong-Baker FACES Scale, is that if it cannot suture the chasm between experience and description, that it can at least gesture across that chasm.”
“During that time, I kicked coffee cold turkey, its own terrible pain for somebody that used to consume around two-to-three pots of the black stuff every day, so that (surprise of surprises!) I discovered that I no longer had high blood pressure.”
“Rather there can be screaming and shrieking, gasping and gritting, the abstract poetry of pain, what Scarry describes as an “immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” Maybe because of this there are precious few great literary works about the topic.”
“The poetry of pain is a failure, yet it’s poetry regardless.”
“Nevertheless, as Scarry argues, once pain subsides, that it “begins to tell a story.” Halting, incomplete, and tentative though it may be, the realm of narrative—of making meaning—attempts its return.”
“So exemplary is the experience of pain, whether it be the bubbling itch of a sunburn or the sick slick slice of a paper cut, that the tools of description naturally flounder when faced with the singularity of such sensations.”
“Just think of the anemic Numerical Rating Scale for patients to rank their pain from 1-10, as if the suffering were giving Rolling Stone magazine album evaluations, or the Wong-Baker FACES Scale whereby the afflicted match their agony to abstracted faces ranging from a beaming and unconcerned cartoon through to a grimacing and afflicted individual, with discrete iterations in that great in-between from best to worst.”
““Whereof one cannot speak,” the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus, “thereof one must be silent,” and though he was making an argument about the status of metaphysical claims, it’s applicable to the failures of description when facing pain as well, though admittedly literal silence is frequently not the result.”
“Literary Hub » Whereof One Cannot Speak: On the Limits of Language to Describe Pain Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Literary Criticism Craft and Advice In Conversation On Translation Fiction and Poetry Short Story From the Novel Poem News and Culture History Science Politics Biography Memoir Food Technology Bookstores and Libraries Film and TV Travel Music Art and Photography The Hub Style Design Sports Become A Member Lit Hub Radio The Lit Hub Podcast Awakeners Fiction/Non/Fiction The Critic and Her Publics Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast Memoir Nation Beyond the Page First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Thresholds The Cosmic Library Culture Schlock Reading Lists Reading Challenge Book Marks Best Reviewed Books CrimeReads True Crime The Daily Thrill Log In Craft and Criticism Fiction and Poetry News and Culture Lit Hub Radio Reading Lists Reading Challenge Book Marks CrimeReads Log In Whereof One Cannot Speak: On the Limits of Language to Describe Pain Ed Simon Explores the Incomplete Poetics of Physical Suffering Ed Simon September 21, 2026 When the pain first arrived, it was during an uncharacteristically temperate Chicago summer more than a decade ago.”
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“First as a slight tingling in my right jaw, barely noticeable, which I could basically ignore as I walked past the red-bricked town homes of Hyde Park while spending a summer seminar at the University of Chicago.”
“Awakened by the crushing, burning agony that now radiated along each one of my upper and lower lateral incisors, canines, and molars, it felt to me as if someone had heated an iron rod and pierced the flesh on my neck just behind my ear and pushed it through my jaw until it burst out through my right cheek.”
“Such methods speak not to a failure of medicine, but rather the far larger failure of language.”
“James September 21, 2026 by Darryl Jones The Best Reviewed Books of the Week "The plot here like the plots in the previous three Mandel novels I've read is…" The Latest Heated Rivalry Imagines a More Inclusive NHL"> Heated Rivalry Imagines a More Inclusive NHL">How Heated Rivalry Imagines a More Inclusive NHL Carlo Rovelli on the Dangers of Getting Trapped Inside Your Own Conceptual Framework Whereof One Cannot Speak: On the Limits of Language to Describe Pain On Finding the Beauty in a Block of Stone Literary Hub Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature Masthead About Sign Up For Our Newsletters How to Pitch Lit Hub Advertisers: Contact Us Privacy Policy Support Lit Hub - Become A Member If you buy books linked on our site, Lit Hub may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.”
“How can one easily impress upon others George Orwell’s observation from Nineteen Eighty-Four that “nothing was so bad in the world as physical pain” if you haven’t been to Room 101 yourself?”