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The coming-of-age movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower is remarkable in many ways. Its characters are relatable and human, and it handles heavy topics authentically and gracefully. It is also a beautiful movie visually, mirroring the story and using the medium of film to its fullest potential. For someone like me growing out of adolescence and into adulthood, it resonates with me. But what I want to talk about today is one line that comes at the end of the movie. The main character, Charlie, is in the back of a pickup truck driving through a tunnel, standing up with the air rushing past his face and his arms in the air. He says: “I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all become somebody’s mom or dad. But right now, these moments are not stories… In this moment, I swear, we are infinite”.
Upon hearing this for the first time I was confused. “Infinite”, as I understood it, was not something to be. It was not a feeling in any context I had seen before, and thinking robotically, it was easy to calculate that this usage was… incorrect. No dictionary or autofill would ever suggest such a word in that situation, it has never been used like that before—it wasn’t made to.
But, I couldn’t ignore the contradiction brewing in my chest. While my brain told me, incessantly, that calling oneself “infinite” was wrong, I couldn’t help but feel in my gut that it was apt. An abstract noun, intended to describe a mathematical concept, seemed to convey the feeling Charlie experienced better than any word made to describe feeling could. Perhaps in that moment he felt euphoria, freedom, solace, hope, or delight. The feeling of fresh air, wind racing on his skin, or the rush of acceleration. You see how difficult it is to write it down. Yet “infinite” manages.
What this line highlights is that language is imperfect. The depth of human experience is too vast to be fully described by some 250000 words. In the end, language is an approximation. It is no doubt a necessary and relevant one, but it is a reduction. Just as we cannot have a word for the unending colors on the visible spectrum, we cannot have a word for every feeling. It’s like trying to list every real number: a natural impossibility.
For writers, I imagine they often encounter the dilemma in which they choose whether to be explained and dissected or to be felt. Most often, language will suffice for both, but every once in a while there will be a scene like this, where you’re faced with a choice. Do you sacrifice the feeling for the explanation, or do you sacrifice explainability and reason for raw, unfettered infinity?