Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect. Discuss...

I'm reading Prime Green by Robert Stone at the minute.

Here's a small extract:

"I have come to believe that language, a line of print, say, is capable of inhabiting the imagination far more intensely than any picture, however doctored. The same principle applies to the novel, if it works. No Hollywood flick, no movie of any provenance, can ever provide an experience of the battle of Borodino as intense as that provided in Tolstoy's pages. Descriptive language provides deeper penetration , attaches itself to the rods and cones of interior perception, to a greater degree than a recovered or remembered image. Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect."

That last sentence caught me, I stopped reading, I read it again...Somewhere in that sentence he has captured a little grain of Truth. That's how I know I'm onto a writer I love. Here, at last, is someone that can express in words something I have always felt. I've tried to express a similar sense of the power of words in the past but always failed. Stone nails it.

BTW Prime Green is not yet available in the UK.

Except at C & P of course - just £15.99...