Readwise.io lets you talk to your notes and it’s amazing
I’ve been using readwise.io for years to collate my Kindle highlights and send me daily e-mails with a random selection of them. My blog posts are often informed by what I encounter in these e-mails and I’ve found it a hugely creative way of engaging with what I’ve read. They’ve now introduced an LLM into the platform, using the highlights for RAG, producing incredibly useful responses which feed directly back to particular sections of books you’ve read.
Here’s a response to the question “When we struggle to put something into words, what is it we are putting into words?”:
1. The Inherited Nature and Limits of Language:
We are born into a language that is not of our own making. The words we have to express ourselves were “forged and modified by generations of speaking beings,” and are not designed to perfectly fit what we are feeling or experiencing. We are obliged to “force our experience into the funnel or straitjacket of the language spoken by those around us,” but often find the words available to us “miss the point, saying too much or too little”—this is referred to as our “alienation in language” alienation in language.
2. The Experience Beyond Words (“the real”): There are aspects of our experience that “become alienated from us” in the very process of articulating them. We “lose those facets of our experience that we are unable to express in the words available to us” loss and alienation in articulation. Truth, in the psychoanalytic sense, often resides in “the experience of symbolizing what has never before been put into words”—what Lacan calls “the real” or “the traumatic real” the unspeakable and the real.
3. The Pre-Conceptual or Felt Sense:
What we are putting into words is often a “bodily felt sense of what wants to be said”—a preconceptual, background, or tacit dimension that has not been fully articulated. The process of articulating it “generates new and surprising forms of insight into their intricate order” bodily felt sense and preconceptual insight.
4. The Discursive Gap:
There is always a gap between experience and language. People “often live in ways they cannot put into words.” This “tension between how we live and what our culture allows us to say” reveals the limits of language and the importance of striving toward a common, shared language to discuss what is otherwise inexpressible living beyond language.
5. The Self in Expression:
In struggling to put something into words, we are also forming or transforming our relationship to that experience. Putting life into storytelling or language “transforms one’s stance”—we take a distance from our immediate experience and allow it to acquire meaning, dignity, and shareability. In this, we turn private complexity into something we can communicate, to ourselves and to others language as conferral of form.
6. The Slippery Object of Desire:
Language “by its very nature has a difficult time capturing or truly depicting the objects of need and desire.” There is always an incompatibility between the immediacy of desire and the mediation of speech slippery nature of language for desire.
7. Felt Meaning and the Search for the Right Words:
Often, what we are trying to put into words is a “felt sense” or an insight—even when the first word we find seems wrong, it is attached to the feeling or meaning we are trying to reach. When we reject tentative language, sometimes we “lose track of the feeling” we wanted to express losing track of felt meaning.
In sum:
When you struggle to put something into words, you are trying to express something that is prior to language—a felt sense, complex experience, or perhaps even something unconscious or previously unsymbolized—that resists easy translation into the shared, structured system of inherited language. This struggle points to the limits and creative possibilities of communication, as well as the continual gap between lived experience and what can be said.
#discourse #EnginesOfArticulation #knowledge #knowledgeBase #learning #Reading #reflecting
