Waking Life (2001)

Glover Gill: Accordion Player

Quotes 

• Accordion Player : And this is where I think language came from. It came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival, like water we came up with a sound for that

  [...] 

  Accordion Player : but when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we're experiencing. When I say love the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travel through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, through their memories of love, or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying and they say, Yes they understand, but how do I know they understand? Because words are inert, they'r ejust symbols, they're dead. And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed, it's unspeakable. And yet, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we have connected, and we think we are understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think that's what we live for.