The mystery of summoning up words. Where are they in the mind, in the brain? They appear to be an agency from nowhere. They exist somewhere in our ground or in our air. They come from unknown darkness. From a place we normally don't think about.
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TL
Tom Lubbock
Art critic
United Kingdom · 1957–2011
Arts and letters
About
Chief art critic of the Independent and a collage artist. Diagnosed in 2008 with a glioblastoma sited next to the speech area of his brain, he kept a journal of losing language while continuing to file reviews, published in the Observer three months before his death and posthumously as Until Further Notice, I Am Alive.
5 answers
For me, no word comes without prior thought. No sentence is generated without effort. No formulation is made automatically. I am faced continually with a mystery that other people have no conception of, the mystery of the generation of speech. There is no command situation, it goes back and back and back. Where the self lies at the heart of the utterance, the speaker generating the word, is always clouded. This is true for everyone, but for most people this is not something to think about. The generation of words is automatic. For me, that automatic link is broken. Word generation involves strain, guesswork, difficulty, imprecision.
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