words-failed

One of the most common platitudes we heard was that __ords failed._ But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language__he comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn__ want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn__ want to know what we did; we didn__ want to know it either.

This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.